


A Difference of Perspectives

by Loudest_Voice



Series: The Legend of God's Eyes [4]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Cameos, Coming of Age, F/M, Magic Ninja Medicine, Non-Massacre AU, Sakura POV, Sequel, Training
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-11
Updated: 2016-05-28
Packaged: 2018-06-07 18:01:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 26,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6818437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loudest_Voice/pseuds/Loudest_Voice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Konoha's running out of medics. Sakura figures it's as good a chance she's gonna get to find her place in the shinobi world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Direct sequel to [this](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6709162), and the story before that. Because I didn't give Sakura enough attention.
> 
> For those who are here for the Sakura POV and have no interest in reading 30k+ words of this AU, here's the gist: Itachi didn't kill his clan and instead crippled all of them. He stayed in Konoha and was assigned Team Seven. Kakashi's still a jounin and does jounin things, and Obito stalks him like cray.
> 
> Thanks to [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02) for beta-reading!

Sakura practiced rolling her eyes in her bathroom mirror until she was satisfied that she’d be able to play the snotty teenager to her mother’s satisfaction. Hana had not gone a day without gazing at her with wide, worried green eyes since she’d returned from her first real ninja mission.

“Do you want me to braid your hair today?” asked Hana as Sakura walked down the stairs.

“Sure.” Sakura feared she didn’t have the bone structure to pull off the gorgeous fishtail braid her mother liked, but she feared Itachi-sensei’s clone even more. Not having her hair in her face if she had to spar with it would help. Maybe.

“I can’t wait for this summer to end,” her mother complained as she carefully untangled all the knots in her pink hair. “Your father’s not getting enough work with all these new genin teams around, and somehow _your_ jounin goes, _‘No, mine are going on real ninja missions’_. The nerve of him!”

“Mom, it was the _one_ mission,” said Sakura, proud of the exasperated tone she mustered. “One brief escort mission.” Where they’d been ambushed by enemy ninja, but Hana didn’t need to know that. “The rest of the time we’re gathering mushrooms for rich merchants, or weeding gardens and chasing cats.”

“But Sakura,” Hana said as she put the finishing touches on her braid and walked around to look her in the eye, “you haven’t been the same since that mission. No, don’t roll your eyes. I _know_ you, and you haven’t been the same.”

“Mom, I’m alright,” said Sakura, sagging. “I promise.”

“Honey, I just want you to know you can quit this whenever you want,” said Hana. “Your father and I aren’t rich, but we can take care of you until you’re old enough to catch a nice husband.”

“Ma, I know.” She sighed. “I can’t be late.”

Sakura had thought of quitting after her first mission. Hell, she’d thought of quitting at least once a day since her very first day as a genin, when Itachi had almost given her a heart attack with his genjutsu. But what Sakura lacked in talent and stamina, she made up for with stubbornness. Or so she hoped.

She found Naruto and Sasuke sparring by the pond at Training Ground Seven, so intent on each other that they didn’t notice her arriving. A few days earlier, Sasuke had declared that he was sick of watching Naruto throw useless Shadow Clones at Itachi’s odious whatever-it-was clone, so they might as well train together until Naruto figured out a way to be less stupid. Naruto had somehow taken it as a goodnatured challenge despite the scorn in Sasuke’s voice, and Sakura wished she could take to ribbing as well as him. Maybe she wouldn’t feel like the odd one out in their team if she did.

Naruto, or one of his clones, ran to her mid-morning, laughing in delight as he wiped sweat from his brow. “Come on, Sakura!” He rolled his shoulder, which had tanned over the last few weeks since he couldn’t wear that dumb orange jacket in the summer heat. “I got the Bastard on the ropes.”

A shuriken buzzed through the air, pierced Naruto’s chest, and lodged itself in the tree behind Sakura about a foot above her head. “Naruto” had disappeared in a puff of smoke the moment the shuriken touched him. Shadow Clone.

“Dumbass!” yelled Sasuke, several yards from Sakura. “Don’t just ignore your opponent.” He rushed towards one of the clones that seemed to be playing on the surface of the pond.

Sakura thought of getting up and throwing the shuriken right back at him, perhaps with some snappy variation of _‘I’m here too, damnit!’_ But then Sasuke would dodge, or snatch the shuriken right out of the air, and fix her with an incredulous stare. Sakura would blush, look at the ground, and pray for the earth to swallow her whole. Better for her if she stayed where she was, doing her best to absorb the anatomy textbook she’d borrowed from one of the secret libraries.

She hated to admit it, but without any guidance, she couldn’t decide which aspects of the human body were worth memorizing. It seemed that every hair follicle had a name of its own sometimes.

The morning continued on in a similar manner. Naruto and Sasuke sparred, Naruto laughing and Sasuke grunting in annoyance. Sakura forced herself through the driest parts of the anatomy textbook, trying to remember the map of blood vessels, if nothing else. Though the book sure liked its caveats about thirty percent of the human population having this variant vasculature, or that uncommon branching pattern.

A pair of crows joined Sakura close to lunchtime. If not for that one strange crow during their first mission, Sakura might not have connected the glossy birds to Itachi, and assumed instead that she’d developed a strange power to attract them. More than once, they’d presented her with odd trinkets and tiny bones, much like a cat brought presents to its human owner. She’d asked Itachi about them, why they seemed to like her better than Sasuke and Naruto, and he’d blandly informed her that crows liked calm people.

Sakura didn’t think he’d meant it as a compliment, but she took it as one anyway. Especially because she was the opposite of calm about everything, including the crows and their gleaming black wings. She’d been sure that they were Itachi’s spies, and that they’d report that she just sat around and read while Sasuke and Naruto trained. But the birds came and went on a daily basis, and Itachi didn’t seem to know (or perhaps care) what his genin did.

She used to be upset about that, but what was the point? Itachi wasn't as bad as he could be. Sakura had an older cousin who refused to work at his father's shop, and instead kept to his room smoking spice weed until the smog made it hard for anyone to even approach him. Like Itachi, he was seventeen. Maybe seventeen-year-old jounin rebelled by doing a shitty job with their genin teams.

Noon came and went without a sign of Itachi. It wasn’t unusual, but that didn’t make it any less of a slap in the face. Nevermind the lost training. Genin could not take missions, even D-ranks, without their jounin. Every day Itachi stood them up was a day they made almost no money. A genin’s flat salary was a joke.

“I’ve left like ten complaints at that box thing in the main Mess Hall,” complained Naruto. “He can’t go on just not showing the fuck up. Imagine if _we_ did that.”

“He probably wouldn’t notice,” said Sasuke.

Sakura doubted that, but she wasn’t about to disagree with Sasuke about Itachi. She might not know what their exact relationship had been prior to Itachi’s . . . Well, Sakura tried not to think about that at all. Like her father always said; better leave ninja clan business to ninja clans.

“Sorry I’m late,” said Itachi, appearing as suddenly as he always did. The crows flew to his shoulders as Naruto sputtered, unbothered by his long dark hair.

“Are you fucking really?” yelled Naruto.

“No, but the custom is to say you’re sorry,” said Itachi. “I’ve picked up a mission.”

Sakura’s heart stuttered, certain that they’d have to leave the village again, but Naruto was complaining seconds after tearing into the mission scroll. Stupid of her to think that Itachi would risk taking them out again when the last time was such a disaster.

“Another missing pet?” Naruto's sigh morphed into a groan. “Can you at least pick up more than one of these? I could do at least four in one afternoon with my Shadow Clones.”

“No, I don’t want you making clones like it’s nothing,” said Itachi.

“But it is like nothing,” said Naruto. “I have tons and tons of chakra.”

“You still only have one brain,” said Itachi. “I’m far from confident in your ability to handle the mental strain of pumping out Shadow Clone after Shadow Clone.”

“Huh?”

Itachi went on to explain, in baffled tones, the disadvantages of clone techniques besides the obvious drain on chakra reserves. It split attention, piled on useless sensory information and memories the instant clones were destroyed or dismissed, and demanded increased sleep from users.

“Isn’t it obvious?” demanded Itachi, frowning at Naruto’s surprised stare. “You must have read the Forbidden Scroll, at least.”

“I read the seals,” said Naruto.

Itachi tilted his head at the same time Sasuke did, and Sakura blinked and looked down at her book. Sometimes they looked so similar that she couldn’t pretend that they weren’t siblings. It was a miracle that Naruto didn’t bring it up at every opportunity.

“Well, maybe if we got more than two shitty missions a week, I wouldn’t be broke,” said Naruto. “How about you worry a little less about my attention, and a little more about how I’m supposed to eat on a genin’s salary, huh?”

“Let’s go to lunch, then,” said Itachi.

Sakura considered that the invitation might have been triggered by guilt, then shot down the idea, and then decided that she didn’t care either way. She loved it when Itachi took them out to eat. Without fail, they ended up in restaurants that she could not afford to set foot in otherwise. At first, she’d been mortified at waltzing into the place in sweaty work clothes, then she took everyone’s resigned acceptance as a visible sign that she was a shinobi, part of Konoha’s ruling class at last.

The reality was that no business owner would turn down a jounin’s patronage just because some ladies in fancy kimonos might sniff at his plain t-shirts and worn sandals. And his sweaty and sometimes loud students (Naruto was loud enough for all three of them).

“Naruto, I need you to stop using Shadow Clone Jutsu so carelessly,” said Itachi as he perused the menu to order for all four of them. He’d started doing that because Sasuke insisted on ordering the cheapest thing on the menu when they all went out to eat. Or so Sakura assumed.

“I told you it’s no big deal,” said Naruto. “Can I get this lamb steak thing? I wanna know why it’s more than my rent.”

“Alright,” said Itachi, “but I’m ordering you to be more careful with your Shadow Clones.”

“Whatever, I need money,” said Naruto. “What, you think I’ll explode or something? I’ve made like a hundred clones without a problem.”

Sakura hated to admit it, but she didn’t see what Itachi was so concerned about. So what if Naruto exhausted himself? What was the worst case scenario that had him so worried? She looked over at Sasuke, but as usual during their team outings, he was stone cold silent.

“I’m not going to repeat myself,” said Itachi. “No Shadow Clones outside sparring. I’ll send you D-rank missions every day from now on.”

“Please,” said Naruto. “I’m gonna shit myself with excitement.”

“Don’t be so vulgar when we’re all getting ready to eat,” said Itachi.

“What about our training, you dick? Do you plan to ever do anything about it?”

“It’s going fine,” said Itachi. “Sakura, what do you want?”

She asked for the soup, wondering if he was about to talk directly to Sasuke about his food preferences. Every day, Itachi seemed to get more comfortable with her and Naruto, and every day, Sasuke seemed to get more constipated about it. It was only a matter of time before he blew up. Sakura hated to admit that a little part of her was looking forward to it.

Sasuke managed to keep himself under control that afternoon. It was probably for the best. Sakura went home relatively content. She’d gleaned another piece of information from Itachi (about the Shadow Clones), which was the closest to teaching she’d ever get from him. Half-explanations followed by _‘Isn’t it obvious?’_ At least she’d gotten some leftovers from the fancy restaurant to wow her parents with.

Training went on, or didn’t go on, as usual. The crows showed up with two D-rank mission scrolls, so their meager earnings increased to less pathetic levels. Occasionally, Itachi himself showed up and threw that awful clone at them for a couple of hours, then disappeared for days at a time. Sakura would have liked it to go on like that, boring, but ultimately safe.

Then one day she showed up at Training Ground Seven and found three other genin waiting for them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02) for beta-reading!

The Hyuuga kid grabbed Sakura’s attention first, though she hadn’t seen anything strange about his eyes from far away. The girl caught her eye second. Sakura admired the cute pair of buns atop her head. No way her own hair was thick enough to pull something like that off. But it was the Hyuuga kid who stood between the girl and the strange kid in the green jumpsuit brighter than the grass around the pond, a step in front of them and looking relaxed. The leader, at least according to their body language.

“Hey what’re you guys doing here?” asked Naruto, rushing to meet them. Sasuke followed, much more cautious, but also careful to maintain a carefree air.

“You must be Team Seven,” said the Hyuuga kid. “Itachi-sensei told us to report here.”

For a second, Sakura feared that Itachi had grown tired of them and asked for a replacement team. She mentally shook herself. Naruto and Sasuke, at least, were steadily improving, despite a criminal lack of instruction.

“Huh?” said Naruto. “You mean our Itachi-sensei? Kinda short, long, girly hair, weird birthmarks under his eyes?”

“There’s not many jounin named Itachi,” said the girl. “I’ve never met a civilian named that either. Wonder what his mother was thinking . . .” The girl trailed off with a nervous look in Sasuke’s direction.

“So what are you doing here?” asked Sasuke.

The girl blushed as the kid in the green suit jumped forward. “Our sensei, the great Might Guy, is on a dangerous mission with his eternal rival, Hatake Kakashi. Itachi-sensei has agreed to take over our training in the interim. I’m Rock Lee, and these are my teammates, Hyuuga Neji and Tenten.”

“Unbelieveable,” said Naruto. “No one’s been even reading my complaints, have they?”

“Didn’t I tell you it was a waste of time?” said Sasuke.

“Complaints?” asked the Hyuuga kid.

Sakura explained their problems about Itachi rarely showing up, then rarely teaching them a thing whenever he bothered. The crows showed up as she added her bitter complaints to Naruto’s list of grievances, but she refused to feel guilty about reporting that Itachi was an irresponsible douche. At least when it came to them. Only Sasuke remained silent.

Well, Sasuke and the Hyuuga kid.

“This is so unfair,” said Tenten later that day, after they’d finished their missions and returned to Training Ground Seven. Milking cows. Sakura hated those too. “I was so excited too. He’s supposed to be the best Shurikenjutsu master in the village.”

“He is?” asked Naruto, blue eyes narrowed. He’d never bothered to do even the most cursory research about Itachi. “Have we ever even seen him use shuriken?”

“Nope,” said Sakura. “Just the clone.” She was sure she’d be seeing it in her nightmares until her dying day.

“This is a disaster,” said Lee. “Guy-sensei will be so mad when he gets back.”

“If he gets back,” said Neji.

“Of course he will get back!” yelled Lee.

Tenten grabbed his arm before he could launch himself at Neji, not that Neji looked particularly concerned. In fact, he shot Lee a tiny smirk before standing up to stretch like a bored cat. “I’m going to train on my own,” he informed them.

“I’ll show you training,” said Lee, jumping to his feet.

Things sort of settled into a routine after that first day. The crows delivered boring D-rank missions that they completed by lunch, then Sasuke and Naruto returned to their sparring, Lee shouted increasingly stupid challenges that Neji ignored, for the most part, and Sakura and Tenten. . . There was no Sakura and Tenten because Tenten actually joined her teammates with their training. It was obvious why she’d mentioned Itachi’s Shurikenjutsu specifically; Tenten’s own Shurikenjutsu was _good_ , better than Sakura had ever seen among their age group.

“Hey, you’re actually pretty good,” Teten told Sasuke one afternoon, a moment after he’d wiped the field clean of Naruto’s clones with a few well-placed shuriken. “I mean, you could be subtler, but your aim’s on point.”

“What do you mean?” asked Sasuke.

Somehow, Tenten didn’t take his tone as a warning. “I mean it’s obvious where you’re aiming by the way you move your arm,” she said, stepping closer to him and grabbing his wrist. “You gotta move your arm in a wide arc for momentum, I get it, but don’t do anything with your wrist until the last moment. Your enemy will have a shorter window to evade.”

That marked a change in Team Seven and Team Guy’s relationship. They all realized that they had specialized skills to share with one another. Tenten and Sasuke traded ideas and techniques about Shurikenjutsu. Naruto made an honest attempt to teach them Shadow Clone Jutsu, though only Neji mustered the focus necessary to produce three clones (unimpressive when compared to Naruto’s legions, but pretty good when compared to Sasuke’s two clones). Lee couldn’t manipulate his chakra, but he didn’t mind that Sasuke watched him spar with bright red eyes. Neji couldn’t share his taijutsu, but he warned Naruto against wasting so much chakra, and told Sasuke that he relied on his left arm too much.

Only Sakura had nothing to bring to the table, and it made her feel smaller and smaller every day, even though no one brought it up. She didn’t have the excuse of not being a clan brat anymore, not when Tenten was as much of civilian, and when Naruto didn’t even have parents. Hell, Lee couldn’t even mold chakra, and he still had something to offer.

She tried harder despite the humiliation of going through Academy training methods when even Naruto, who’d graduated dead last in their group, was already good enough to spar with clan brats. Sure, he always lost, but Neji and Sasuke rarely looked outright bored. No one pointed and laughed at her, and Lee even went out of his way to yell consistent (if sometimes annoying) encouragement, but Sakura still fought back tears whenever she trembled with exhaustion after a third lap running up and down the waterfall that fed their pond.

“You can do it!” said Lee, smiling as brightly as the summer sun. “Two days ago, you could only do one lap!”

Yes, she could. At her current pace, she might manage a single Shadow Clone by the end of the year.

A week into the joint missions and training, Itachi deigned to show up at Training Ground Seven. As Naruto sputtered at him, Sakura noted that he wore a partial ANBU uniform. It was probably nothing, except that Itachi had been an ANBU captain before being made a jounin-sensei. Maybe he ignored his genin team all the time because he was still running missions for ANBU?

“I see that you’ve all reached an adequate degree of stamina and control,” said Itachi after Naruto finishing ranting.

“How could you see shit when you haven’t _been_ here?” demanded Naruto, apparently not done ranting after all.

“So I’ve decided to teach you Nature Transformation,” finished Itachi.

“And—wait, really?” Naruto beamed, as though Itachi had morphed into his favorite person in the world. Even Sasuke seemed eager for a second, but he tamped it down so quickly that Sakura told herself she must have imagined it.

Sakura knew of chakra sensing paper from her studies, and from gazing at samples through a display window as she sighed wistfully at the price tag. A single piece went for about as much as an A or S-rank mission, depending on the season, and stores ran out of stock constantly, sometimes for months on end. Trees only grew as fast as they wanted to, after all, and feeding them chakra at a constant rate made the process even more delicate. Sakura had doubted she’d ever touch a shred of the stuff, and settled for saving up for patterned socks to wear during Konoha’s next harvest festival.

So she was beside herself, though she tried to be less obvious about it than Naruto. Itachi had brought six pieces of chakra-sensing paper with him, and he told Lee to go ahead and use one up even if he couldn’t mold chakra, just so they could “see what would happen”.

It burned. Lee was ecstatic because it showed he had a strong Will of Fire or whatever, and Itachi told him he might be particularly resistant to Wind.

“I do like to train against a strong Wind!” said Lee.

Sakura’s paper got soaked the instant it touched her palm, and it couldn’t be a good sign that she got more excited when the same thing happened with Neji’s. She threw caution to the wind and embraced the feeling. She didn't find out that she had something in common with a clan brat any random day, even if that something was as beyond their control as nature affinity.

Sasuke got lightning, which was damned rare for a Leaf ninja, and even rarer for his clan. According to what Sakura had read about them anyway, months and months ago, at the height of her Sasuke crush. All she could find on Lightning Release was warnings about its destructive potential, including to the ninja attempting it.

Naruto and Tenten were attuned with Wind, though of course Naruto complained that as far as jutsu went, Itachi had gone for the most boring one imaginable.

“Who cares about what this stupid paper does?” he demanded. “How’s it gonna help in a fight?”

“Naruto, you’ve been begging me to teach you ninjutsu since day one,” said Itachi. “Well, Nature Transformation is the basis of all ninjutsu. So let’s get started.”

His subsequent demonstrations were brief and silent. He attracted water from the pond and molded it around his hand like a ribbon, shredded leaves into tiny pieces with . . . the force of his mind, maybe? Flames burst on his hand, and it took Sakura a second to work out that he must have ignited the air around his palm.

“Wow, magical!” said Lee.

“It’s not magic,” said Itachi, all prim and proper, though Sakura liked to pretend no one else could see the subtle shifts in his tone and body language. “It’s chakra manipulation.”

He extinguished his flame and pulled a kunai from his pocket. Light flickered through it, then a faint buzz reached Sakura’s ears and was drawn out by a breeze in the next instant. “That’s the extent of what I can do with lightning.” Itachi tossed the kunai at Sasuke. “You should be able to do more. Be careful with the rebound.”

The what?

But Sasuke didn’t ask for clarification, and Sakura didn’t want to step into the violent undercurrent going through all their interactions.

“Anyway,” said Itachi, “we can talk about jutsu once you finish your exercises. Feel free to help each other.” He flickered away as Naruto started raising his hand.

“Damnit!” yelled Naruto.

“What exercises?” asked Tenten.

“I think he wants us to do what he did?” said Sakura, a little uncertain. Did he mean just their particular affinities, or all of them? Obviously, he couldn’t have more than one affinity, but that didn’t stop him from completing all the exercises.

“Even me?” asked Lee. “I cannot even mold chakra.”

“I would yell for him,” said Naruto, “but it never works.”

Sasuke sighed.

“Everyone, just calm down,” said Neji. “I watched closely, and I’m pretty sure I can do what he did, and then I’ll teach you.”

“We all saw him too, genius,” said Naruto.

Neji tilted his head. “You’re disadvantaged, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but Neji here has the strongest Byakugan in the village,” said Lee, patting Neji’s shoulder. “He will help us complete the challenge . . . I mean, he will help you guys, and I challenge myself to double my weighted speed in the meantime.”

Sakura had her doubts. Strongest Byakugan or not, Neji was still just a kid, and if he were the insanely powerful type that could master all affinities, then he’d be a jounin already. Itachi himself had been promoted at thirteen, though under circumstances that were better left unmentioned, especially in front of Sasuke. Besides, wasn’t the Sharingan the dojutsu with all the unfair copycat abilities? If someone could just look at a technique and figure out how it worked, shouldn’t it be Sasuke?

But still. Sakura wouldn’t turn down any help Neji was willing to offer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02) for beta-reading!

“This will be more difficult than I anticipated,” said Neji two days later, as he tried to coax water to rise from the surface of the lake and envelop his arm like a glove. Already, a thin film with a faint blue glow from chakra almost reached his elbow.

Sakura wasn’t quite that far along, but she tried to be proud that water coated the palm of her hand and almost made a glove. Neji had a year of training on her, possibly a good teacher, and a kekkei genkai that was all about chakra manipulation on his side. Unfair, but it was the way of things. She shifted until she was cross-legged on the surface of the pond, glad that she’d chosen black pants in the morning. Hot summer sunlight beat down on them, and wet clothes would help keep her cool for a while.

Sighing, she let the water coating her hand go and slapped the surface of the pond. What a tedious exercise.

“How did you do that?” asked Neji, staring at her with bulging veins around his eyes. Usually, he was very handsome, but those veins did his face no favors. “How did you do that?” he repeated, huffing.

“Do what?”

With a grunt, Neji let the water coating his arm go. Then he slapped the pond. Drops of water flew upwards in a wide arc, then splashed down again.

“Eh. . .” Sakura copied the motion. Twice. She couldn’t guess what he was getting at.

“No, use your chakra,” said Neji, rolling his eyes. He laid his palm flat on the water.

Sakura didn’t notice anything at first, then fat droplets of water started rising from the pond and hovering about an inch from the surface, reminding her of boiling tea if water rose from the pot rather than steam. She shifted, but the water did not heat, even as the radius of area with rising droplets increased.

“How—”

“—Sh,” said Neji. But the droplets abruptly fell back onto the pond, and he grunted in frustration and slapped the water.

Sakura didn’t have fancy eyeballs, but she had hours of reading about the properties of water and some cursory knowledge of how the Byakugan worked from that month at the Academy when she’d done a report on Konoha’s dojutsu. Squaring her shoulders, she laid her hand on the surface of the pond and directed her chakra towards her palm. Spreading her focus outward, as she assumed Neji had done, was beyond her, so she raised her hand.

Small droplets tried to follow her palm, and she laughed even though they fell back down once her hand was a few inches away from the pond.

“You’re not entirely stupid,” said Neji, smirking at her.

As far as compliments went, it was so backwards it turned right around into an insult. Sakura still blushed, and batted his shoulder lightly.

“How did you figure it out?” asked Neji.

Sakura told him of the books and scrolls she’d read, some long before she ever made genin and met Itachi. She even described her limited knowledge of Byakugan and Gentle Fist, and the brief research she’d done about the properties of water.

“Water is attracted to itself,” she said, waving her hands, “and it’s supposed to be the best affinity for people with low stamina, because water is super-common and you only need a little chakra to start a big chain-reaction, so I went from there. Couldn’t do much though.” She sagged and looked down. “My stamina is _really_ bad.”

“Yeah, and your breathing is not helping,” said Neji.

“Huh?”

“You hold your breath when you strain for more chakra, and it breaks your concentration,” said Neji. “It’s a common mistake. Meditate about it, or ask Itachi, I don’t know. Let’s gather our teams.”

The Buddha would probably answer Sakura’s questions faster than Itachi, but what did Neji care about that? She went off to collect Sasuke and Naruto, and met Team Guy by the pond a few minutes later.

“I’ve worked out that this would be easier if we knew the theories behind Nature Transformation,” said Neji.

Technically, Sakura had worked that out, but again, whatever. Neji could take all the credit as long as he continued to help her. The rest of the team was more likely to listen to him anyway.

“So,” continued Neji, “we should take one of these afternoons to visit the secret libraries and recon, then recap the basics for each other.”

“Uh,” said Naruto.

“That’s a great idea!” said Lee.

“Who died and made you boss?” demanded Sasuke.

Neji smirked. “Do you have any better ideas, or just a tantrum?”

“Alright, let’s just pause here,” said Tenten, grabbing Naruto’s wrist before he started waving it around to protest. Sasuke glared at Neji, but let her go on. “It’s actually a good idea. Itachi gave us zero pointers, and a few hours at the library can’t be more boring than staring at a leaf until you get a headache.”

“There’s nothing in this for you,” Sasuke told Lee.

Sakura smiled. If it was her watching her teammates learn some cool new technique that she would never be able to emulate, she’d be drowning in jealousy. She was even a little jealous of the kekkei genkai, never mind that they were a huge target on people’s backs. And the cherry on top of it all, she was even jealous of Lee for being a better person than her.

Not much to do for it except to put as much effort into her research as possible.

She didn’t get to share her carefully-crafted tables and diagrams because Itachi showed up again the afternoon they planned to gather and share their findings with each other.

“ANBU has called all non-essential personnel still in the village to the Tower,” he said, cutting Naruto’s annoyed greeting short. “Let’s go.”

Sakura hadn’t been a ninja for long, but she doubted that impromptu, village-wide general summons by ANBU were ever a good sign. She looked around the Tower’s lobby, trying to read the expressions on the older chuunin’s faces. Grim, but no more so than usual. There were few chuckles within the undercurrent of whispers floating through the room, which made a chill run down Sakura’s spine. The crowd spilled outside the lobby and surrounded the Tower, so the announcement would have to be repeated several times throughout the day.

“Hey, there’s Kiba,” said Naruto, waving towards him. “Hey!”

Sure enough, Team Eight loitered a few feet away from them, their jounin managing to melt into the background despite her unusual outfit that resembled a large scroll worked into a short dress. Sakura felt a pang of jealousy for Hinata, even though she was the only clan brat she’d ever encountered who never walked around with her head held high. It wasn’t just her Byakugan either, because Neji had the dojutsu and he was so effortlessly arrogant that he made Sasuke look hesitant and humble.

Regardless, Hinata’s jounin was a kunoichi, and even if she wasn’t the best jounin in Konoha, she couldn’t be a worse teacher than Itachi.

“I got a bad feeling about this,” said Tenten.

“Oh, what is the worse that could happen?” asked Lee.

“Maybe the Hokage declared war on someone,” said Sasuke.

Neji snorted.

“That’s not it,” said Itachi, as Sakura hoped that no one thought anything of Sasuke’s word choice.

_The Hokage_. Not _Hokage-sama_. From anyone else, it wouldn’t be so much as a blip, but from an Uchiha. . .

Someone banged on the gong by a podium at the southern corner of the lobby, and all conversation faded. Sakura rose to the tips of her toes, grunting at all the tall ninja standing in front of her, then she spotted Ino using chakra to climb a wall and perch near the roof. Frowning at herself for not thinking of something so obvious quicker, she followed Ino’s example, ignoring the smirk Ino sent her way. Most vertically-challenged ninja were doing the same, and in a few minutes the crowd had arranged itself so that almost everyone could see the stage.

The tallest ninja Sakura had ever seen stepped forward, wearing a white coat over standard black slacks. A pair of masked ninja and three kunoichi wearing medical white coats stood behind him. “I’m Eiji, one of the medics,” he told the room, “and I got some bad news. Nobuo, esteemed veteran surgeon of our medical corps, committed suicide this morning.”

“That warranted summoning us all to the Tower?” asked someone in the crowd.

“We’re all here,” said Eji, “so evidently, yes. Now let me finish my announcement. I promise there'll be time for questions at the end.” 

Low gripes rumbled for a few moments, but Sakura didn’t think anyone wanted those masked ninja involved, even if no one respected Eiji—

Eiji, the medic, Itachi’s boyfriend!

Sakura almost gasped, then stole a glance towards Itachi. Nothing interesting. Sensei just watched the speech quietly, a blank look on his face. So much for all the rumors. She shook herself and paid closer attention to the medic’s speech.

“Ayane died on a mission to Iwa last month, and Hiriko and Jun both caught a nasty strain of pneumonia and passed two weeks ago,” said Eiji. “That leaves us with ten active jounin medics for the entire village, and only because I was promoted half-an-hour ago. . . Yes, I look forward to your thoughts and concerns on my public profile later.”

A wave of whispered grumbles passed over the crowd, then Eiji waved a hand.

“I don’t have all day, people,” he said. “Fifteen chuunin medics have been killed in C and A-ranks over the last year, so Hokage-sama has approved a generous fifteen-percent flat salary increase to any genin or chuunin who joins the medical corp.”

Genin? They’d take genin too?

“So you’re getting a double-raise?” asked someone in the crowd.

“We can always trust you to zero-in on the important matters,” said Eiji without identifying the speaker. “If you’re interested, sign the scroll on your way out, and one of us chuunin medics. . . I mean, one of the chuunin medics will seek you out and evaluate you for the medical corp. If anyone has questions, now’s the time.”

“If you’re a genin, do you need your jounin’s permission?” asked someone Sakura didn’t know.

“Genin need jounin approval to take a dump, so yes,” said Eiji. “I doubt any would say no, though. If you’re approved, medical training would get you out of their hair at least twice a week.”

“Why don’t more Hyuuga volunteer for the med corp?”

“Does anyone really think that’s a question I can answer?” asked Eiji.

“Are wait times at the hospital gonna get even worse?”

“Alright, I wasn’t clear,” said Eiji. “Does anyone have any questions that aren’t stupid?”

“Don’t you need excellent chakra stamina and control, and also above-average combat scores?”

“I told you I just got promoted,” said Eiji. “That should tell you something about where our standards are right now.”

If it was a joke, then it fell flat. Sakura could guess what less-skilled medics meant, especially for combat shinobi who brought in most of Konoha’s revenue.

“All bullshit aside,” said Eiji, sighing, “we need more than just people who can learn how to use chakra scalpels. Few other villages can do what we can, and they get by. There’s suturing and drugs, and someone always needs to hold delirious jounin down. And that’s before we consider all the other shit that goes on in a hospital. There’s mountains of paperwork, accounting, scheduling, shit. . . Just keeping the building _clean_ is a nightmare.”

“Yeah, we all became shinobi to be hospital janitors,” said someone in the crowd.

“Oh, come on,” said Eiji, “how many of you still think you’re gonna become the badass you dreamed up at the Academy?”

That started a wave of complaints too loud to be called mere grumblings. Eiji waved a hand and rolled his eyes when one of the masked ninja tried to step forward.

“Look,” he said, “the village is giving you a chance to be useful. Not necessarily powerful, or famous, or recognized, but _useful_. Sign up, or don’t. I don’t care, but I have work to do. So bye; make room for the next batch of people that needs to hear this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02) for beta-reading!

It was barely mid-afternoon when the med-jounin dismissed them, so Konoha’s rookie genin (plus Team Guy, except for Neji) made their way to the plaza nearest to the Tower. Without a jounin among them, they couldn’t approach any of the fancier restaurants, so they settled for shaved ice and jumped to the roof of one of the administrative buildings.

“Any of you planning to take the big guy up on it?” Naruto asked.

Sakura didn’t even know why she hadn’t asked Itachi’s permission to sign up immediately. Hadn’t she spent the better part of the month trying, and mostly failing, to make sense of an anatomy textbook?

“Let’s just say he makes a compelling argument,” said Ino, laying her head on Shikamaru’s shoulder.

“Which part?” asked Kiba, as he scratched behind Akamaru’s ears. “The holding down crazy jounin, or the playing hospital janitor thing?”

“The part about the med corp lowering their standards,” said Sasuke. “Rising through the ranks there will probably be easier than in any other division.”

No way. Was Sasuke implying that . . .

“Bastard, are you saying you’ll do the medic thing?” asked Naruto.

“No,” said Sasuke, rolling his eyes. “I need to be a combat specialist.”

“I’m considering it,” said Shikamaru.

“What, really?” asked Choji.

“Think about it,” said Shikamaru.

Sakura leaned forward. Shikamaru was the smartest genin in the village. Smarter than Neji even, she would bet.

“Medics get steady, relatively safe work all-year round,” he said. “I bet I could learn chakra scalpels if I really wanted to, and it’s probably the most versatile, brutal jutsu in the village. How many shinobi can say they’ve got a vital role to play, job security, personal security, and minimal political bullshit to deal with?”

“You’re looking at it with rose-tinted glasses,” said Shino. He still held his cup of lime-flavored shaved ice, and a fly hovered around it. Had he even tasted it?

“Captured medics rarely even get tortured,” said Shikamaru, then shrugged. “They might get a broken rib here and there for formality’s sake, but my dad says they almost always make it back to the village unharmed.”

Sakura didn’t see how broken ribs were “a formality”, but she liked the sound of being let go without much fuss if she was ever captured by enemy nin.

“You know most medics are girls, right?” asked Ino, smirking up at Shikamaru.

“That big medic from today was hardly feminine,” he said.

“You’d never last in the med corp, Shika,” said Kiba. “My sister’s a med-chuunin, and when she’s not at the hospital, she’s studying. And when she’s not at that, she’s on missions, or training the younger medics, or seeing to the villagers’ physicals and vaccines. I don’t think she sleeps.”

“There goes my consideration,” said Shikamaru.

“Why would all that even matter?” asked Naruto. “If the village needs medics, and if they’re really that cool . . .” He trailed off, frowning.

Sakura sighed, imagining what must be going through Naruto’s head. He dreamed of his name being whispered with awe, not just gratitude, but he also wanted to help Konoha.

“There’s never been a medic-Hokage,” said Kiba, though he smirked so hard that Sakura doubted that he’d started taking Naruto’s pseudo-political ambitions seriously.

“We’ve had four in all our history, dumbass,” said Shikamaru. “That’s hardly an adequate sample size.”

“Don’t torture yourself over it, dead last,” said Sasuke. “You’ll never have the chakra control necessary to be anything more than a rank-and-file medic anyway.”

“Oh yeah?” demanded Naruto, standing over Sasuke with curled fists. “How about I break your bones and see if I can mend them?”

“Guys, just sit down,” said Sakura. Trying to distract them, she turned towards Tenten. “What about you two?”

“I’m not gonna do it,” said Tenten, shaking her head. “It’s tempting, but Shurikenjutsu is my passion, and medics have no use for it.”

“Same for taijutsu,” said Lee.

“Who are these guys?” asked Ino.

Sakura explained the situation with their sensei, both hoping and not hoping that Lee and Tenten would complain about Itachi’s absence. She would like to commiserate about the unfairness of it all, but she also liked lording her powerful jounin-sensei over Ino. Let her think that she had upperclassmen to learn from too. She had three clans and Hokage-sama’s son on her side.

“What about the third member of your team?” asked Choji, as he munched on his potato chips.

“Itachi-sensei asked Neji to stay behind,” said Lee.

“Why?” asked Kiba.

Tenten shrugged. “Could have been about that S-rank Neji went on last month. Or just about something or someone they want him to check out with his Byakugan.”

Wait, Neji went on S-rank missions? And the brass asked for his Byakugan specifically? There were dozens, maybe over a hundred, older, more experienced Hyuga in Konoha.

“This guy not a genin?”

“Technically, yes,” said Tenten. “But he probably could’ve passed the chuunin exams a couple of months after graduating the Academy.”

“You need a three-man squad to enter,” added Lee, “and Guy-sensei did not think me or Tenten were ready. Me, mostly. But we will enter the next round for sure.”

“That must’ve made him happy,” said Kiba. “I bet he’s been insufferable.”

“No, Neji’s not like that,” said Tenten. “I mean, he’s definitely arrogant, but he’s never complained about staying a genin longer because of us.”

“Regardless,” said Ino, “there’s no way a guy like that is gonna coop himself up at the hospital.”

“Unfortunately, that is not his call to make,” said Lee. “If his family decides that he will be a medic, then he will be the best medic in Konoha.”

“Huh?” said Naruto.

“I’m going to do it,” said Hinata.

“Seriously?” said Kiba, while Sakura registered her presence for the first time during their discussion.

Come to think of it, it was odd that Sakura felt like she knew Neji better than Hinata after a week and a half of training nearby him when she’d been classmates with Hinata for years.

“That’s a great call,” continued Kiba. “You’d be great—and safe—in the hospital.”

“Right, but why can’t Neji decide if he wants to be a medic or not?” asked Naruto.

“He’s a Hyuga,” said Tenten.

“And?” insisted Naruto. “So’s Hinata, and she’s deciding to do it. Why can’t he do that too? Or the opposite?”

No one spoke. Hinata’s shoulders hunched, and she started tapping her index fingers together.

“I’m heading back home,” said Sasuke.

“Huh?” said Naruto. “Hey, wait up.”

Everyone took Sasuke’s cue and said their goodbyes, studiously ignoring Naruto’s exasperated questions. Sakura sighed, certain that Sasuke would explain the situation to him, and waved at Tenten and Lee before heading out herself. She took the long way home, hoping that the cool wind running through the trees would help clear her mind.

Yesterday, she’d have told anyone who suggested a recruitment drive in the med-corp that she’d jump at the opportunity. So why did the thought of asking Itachi for permission to add her name to the list of those who wanted to be evaluated make her heart race? Why couldn’t she ever just decide something without getting twisted up into knots about it?

She spent most of dinner trying to decide whether she should tell her parents about the announcement or not. They’d want her to sign up, she was sure, but she didn’t want them getting all hopeful for something that might not happen.

“Pass me the rice, would you?” her father, Hiro, asked as he cleaned bones out of his fish.

The streaks of silver in his pink hair got wider every year. He tried to hide it, but Sakura was nothing if not observant, and she could tell whenever his old shoulder injury acted up. It wasn’t even a war wound, the kind that might get him some help from the veterans department. Hiro was an independent carpenter. A concrete brick fell on his shoulder when Sakura was about nine, and he hadn’t been the same since.

“There’s a recruitment drive at the medical corp.” Sakura forced the words out before she could chicken out.

“Yeah?” said her mother, smiling without a care about the food in her mouth.

“Sakura, that’s wonderful!” said Hiro. “You know getting in there without years of service or family strings to pull is next-to-impossible.”

“It might still be next-to-impossible,” said Sakura, sighing.

“It’s easier than it was yesterday,” said Hana.

And that was that. Her parents expected her to try-out now, and they’d probably hunt down Itachi to personally yell at him if Sakura pretended that he’d told her no before working up the courage to actually ask him. The situation would be slightly less embarrassing for her if Itachi turned her down for real.

* * *

 

Sakura got up extra early the next morning, determined to be the first person at Training Ground Seven in the very miniscule possibility that Itachi would show up earlier than all of them. The chances that he’d show up at all were slim to begin with, but Sakura really wanted to ask him for permission to try out for the medical corp in private.

Of course, Itachi was nowhere to be seen when Sakura made it to training, but she did catch Team Guy coming in. Tenten rode piggy-back on Neji’s back, and Sakura’s first impulse was to wonder if Tenten had somehow been injured.

Well, her first impulse was a burst of unusual jealousy, though she didn’t know what she could be jealous about, for once. That Tenten was so close with her teammates that she could literally jump on one of them? If Sakura tried that with Sasuke. . . She couldn’t even imagine how Sasuke would react, actually. Naruto would probably take it as a declaration of love.

“What’s going on?” she asked when Team Guy was close enough for talking.

“I spent all night listening to my parents rant that I should be a medic,” said Tenten, pushing her face into the back of Neji’s head. “Didn’t sleep a wink.”

“Yeah, alright,” said Neji. “We’re here now, so get off to sleep on the grass.”

“Tenten,” said Lee, adopting his usual fighting stance. “If you want want, you can ride on my back all day as I spar with Sasuke.”

“No thanks,” said Tenten, hopping off Neji’s back and plopping down on the grass.

“What about you?” Sakura asked Neji. “Are you trying for the medical corp?”

“I’ve gotten no such orders,” said Neji with a little smirk. “But who knows? It’d be the least violent way to get rid of me.”

Get rid of him? Why would his family want that?

Neji shrugged. “They also could’ve sent me into the med corp since day one, and they haven’t, so they’re probably not gonna do it now.”

“Hey!” Naruto yelled from the entrance, waving before rushing forward. Sasuke trailed behind him, hands in his pockets.

Sakura startled, grateful for their timing. Continuing the conversation about Neji’s “orders” probably wouldn’t lead anywhere pleasant.

“Neji,” said Naruto, abruptly subdued. He slowed, not bothering to hide his stare towards Neji as he approached them. “So. . .”

“I haven’t been banished to the med corp yet,” said Neji. “Thanks for your concern. Now, let’s get back to our training.”

The crows didn’t come to them that morning, or they came but didn’t bring scrolls, and Sakura didn’t notice them. Either way, it would be a day with no money and no lessons to make up for it unless Itachi showed up. Which he did, about an hour after they returned from lunch, much to Sakura’s shock.

“You’re here, in the flesh, two days in a row,” said Naruto, while Itachi gazed at them with disinterest. “Gee, I hope no one’s dead.”

“Are you making any progress with Nature Transformation?” asked Itachi.

“No,” snapped Naruto, at the same time Neji said, “Yes.”

A gust of wind blew Itachi’s dark bangs in front of his face, but as usual, he didn’t react. “Well, show me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02) for beta-reading!

Sakura was not surprised when Itachi merely watched Neji lift water off the surface of the pond and then mold it into a glove that ended below his elbow, but she _was_ disappointed. He didn’t even ask to see what she could do before wandering off to Naruto and Tenten, and though that was a bit of a. . . alright, a huge relief, it still stung.

“This is boring,” Neji said a couple of hours later, looking over at the grass field beside the pond.

Itachi had stayed and set his clone on Sasuke and Lee. They probably wouldn’t be able to beat it, but at least they had it evading more attacks than usual. Since Team Guy’s arrival, Sasuke had been steadily copying Lee’s swift taijutsu, and Sakura assumed Lee had been helping him. Sasuke’s kicks were as acrobatic as his partner’s, and they moved in synch, trying to catch Itachi’s clone as it jumped away from their strikes. 

The clone actually attacked back, grabbing Lee’s shin and throwing him back onto the grass. It had to leap to the left to evade a stream of Sasuke’s shuriken, and Lee skidded on the grass, landed on his feet, and then jumped to follow Sasuke’s throw with a horizontal kick. 

“They’re not going to win,” said Neji, as the clone ducked, flickered behind Sasuke, and swept his feet out from under him.

“I’ve never seen the clone attack before,” said Sakura.

Neji shrugged. “He’s the best jounin in the village; Lee’s a loser, and Sasuke’s too emotional and untrained.”

“That’s your teammate.” Maybe it shouldn’t be, but it was strange to hear Neji being so. . . mean.

“He’s still a loser.”

Sakura grunted, and turned her attention back to the water. That was just the way guys talked about each other. Didn’t Naruto and Sasuke go around calling each other Dead Last and Bastard, even now that they seemed attached at the hip? Neji and Lee were probably the same, never mind that Neji’s tone wasn’t even heated, as if calling Lee a loser were as significant as declaring that the sky was blue. 

“Do you want to spar?” asked Neji.

“Me?” 

“Who else is here?” 

Naruto and Tenten had retreated to a clearing behind the cluster of trees east of the pond, and Sasuke and Lee had their hands full with Itachi’s clone, but no one ever asked Sakura to spar. She was worse at it than Naruto, hesitant on her feet, unable to pack enough aggression into her muscles to do much damage with the few hits she managed to land, and too slow to get up when she stumbled. Only Ino ever got her so mad that she forgot how much she sucked, and it just reminded Sakura that she had little hope against anyone who’d been practicing taijutsu since they could walk.

“Never mind,” said Neji.

“No, wait,” said Sakura, waving her hands. “I’m just thinking—”

“—that you’re never going to beat me, so why bother?” Neji rolled his eyes.

Sakura moved before she even realized it.

Whatever she’d tried to do, Neji just moved out of the way, too slowly and annoyed for it to be called dodging.

“What are you doing?”

“I didn’t say no,” said Sakura, dropping into a neutral stand. Behind her, Sasuke and Lee continued their hopeless fight against Itachi’s clone. If they were willing to try no matter how pointless it was, then the least she could do was fight Neji and soak up whatever she could learn from the inevitable defeat.

“Look, I shouldn’t have asked,” said Neji. “Forget it.”

“No, I’m not some weakling,” said Sakura.

“Yes, you are,” said Neji. “It’s better that you recognize that about yourself, and move on. That medic also said they need help with paperwork and keeping the hospital clean.”

Sakura threw a punch, then another when Neji just leaned backwards, eyebrows furrowed in annoyance. 

It was just like fighting the clone, but worse. Sakura had never been so mad at the clone that she ignored her shortening breath and followed up her useless strikes with even more useless strikes. She chased Neji over the pond, throwing punches blindly at first, then slowing down to try and come up with some kind of strategy. Neji only stared, a faint smirk on his lips, silently goading her into trying again and again. He didn’t even adopt a fighting stance, not that Itachi’s clone ever did, but Neji was just a damned _genin_ like her. 

Her heart jackhammered away in her chest, and her throat hurt from sucking in dry air through her mouth. Neji tilted his head, looking so amused that if there was any justice in the world, the sky would open up and lightning would strike him down. Instead, Sakura’s calves trembled, and the surface of the pond suddenly got wobbly. 

“Come on,” said Neji, slipping his arm around her waist. He helped her as she stumbled off the pond and onto the wet earth surrounding it, trying not to cry. 

What had she expected? That a little adrenaline would make a difference?

“It’s not your fault,” said Neji. “Some people are meant to be stars, and others are meant to watch them.”

She watched Sasuke and Lee struggle against Itachi’s clone, relieved that her eyes dried without her having to choke herself unconscious or something. Sasuke was reaching his limit, mentally, if not physically. He aimed a cluster of shuriken, and the clone had to grab Lee’s ankle to pull them both out of the line of fire. 

“Hey, be careful!” yelled Lee, once he noticed what had happened. “I almost got him there, and it would not have been fair.”

Even from so far away, Sakura could see that Sasuke was breathing hard. 

“I don’t want to be a star,” said Sakura, watching Sasuke stalk away in frustration. “I just want to not suck.”

Neji chuckled, and it should’ve made Sakura angrier, considering. The fight, if it could be called that, had drained all the rage out of her.

“You could suck a little less,” said Neji. “Tell Itachi—”

“—He doesn’t know I’m alive,” said Sakura, groaning. 

“Fine, then,” said Neji. “I’ll help you fix your most egregious mistakes. The med corp isn’t as safe as people like to believe, or we wouldn’t have a shortage of medics.”

And now Sakura’s eyes welled up with tears, more so than they had when she’d admitted defeat. He spent half-an-hour mocking her, and it’d just made her mad, but one tiny comment that approached a slight show of confidence and her eyes turned into waterfalls. What the hell was wrong with her? He could _see_ her.

“You really think I could do it?” she asked. “Join the med corp?”

“The med-jounin said they’d take almost anyone,” said Neji. “You’re better than a random, probably.”

Sakura chuckled. As far as votes of confidence went, it was a step above laughing in her face.

“So ask Itachi for permission to sign up if you really want to try,” said Neji. “The med corp won’t be clamoring for recruits forever, and Itachi’s not going to suggest it. Like you said, he barely knows you’re alive.”

“What if he says no?”

“Then he says no and forgets about it,” said Neji. “You’ve got nothing to lose except your hope. Hope’s pretty useless anyway. The sooner you get rid of it, the better.”

Easy enough for one of the stars to say that. He had plenty to cling to besides hope.

Still, he had a point. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of career chuunin in the village with no love for paperwork who’d probably jump at the chance for a change of pace. She had to ask Itachi. 

A better chance might not come for a week. Itachi actually stayed with them for an afternoon snack after vanishing his clone, wearing a pleasant look while Naruto babbled about his progress with the leaf slicing exercise. If he noticed that Itachi wasn’t paying attention, it didn’t deter him. 

“And Sensei,” Naruto said, as Itachi daintily picked at fat pocky stick out of a box from a brand Sakura didn’t know, “Neji got the idea we should read, and Tenten and I found a scroll that said wind is like when gases in the air heat up and expand, and then cooler air moves in to replace it, so the trick is to make your chakra hot and then take over the cool air and move it like an invisible knife.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” said Tenten.

“What, do I sound simple?” said Naruto.

Itachi bit the tip of the pocky, then his eyebrows furrowed slightly. “Anyone want to try this?”

“Me, me!” said Lee.

“That doesn’t have alcohol, right?” asked Neji. “Not even a little bit?”

“No, it’s just a little sour.” Itachi handed Lee the box.

“Pay attention, Sensei!” Naruto leaned closer, forcing Itachi to look him in the eye. “I’m trying to tell you about the wind thing.”

Why couldn’t he just be quiet? Sakura needed a second to ask Itachi for permission to try out for the med corp.

“Naruto, I know the theory behind Wind Release,” said Itachi.

“Then why didn’t you tell us?” demanded Naruto.

“Who doesn’t know the basics of wind formation?”

“It’s like you want everyone to hate you,” said Naruto. 

Itachi chuckled, and Sakura mentally let out a relieved sigh. The last thing she needed was for Naruto to ruin whatever good mood had prompted Itachi to come and spend time with them. 

“Sensei,” she forced herself to say, stealing a glance towards Neji, who offered a little smirk that she chose to interpret as encouraging, “I wanted to ask you, I mean, ask for your permission to try out for the med corp.”

“Alright,” said Itachi, with a brief look her way. “Just put my reg number next your name when you sign up. Zero-one-two-one-one-zero. Anybody else planning to try?”

Sakura sighed, too relieved to bother to hide it. Then she chuckled and glanced towards Neji, who looked around as their teammates explained why they didn’t want to be med-ninja, no way. Well, Sasuke just grunted, and Itachi didn’t even bother to ask Neji at all. 

“I’m gonna go sign up, then,” said Sakura, rising from the grass as she let out a nervous laugh. “Wouldn’t want to run out of spots.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here.


	6. Interlude: Itachi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02) for beta-reading!
> 
> Uh. . . This was supposed to be shorter.

Itachi couldn’t be a captain anymore, so he sat outside Boar’s cubicle of an office waiting for orders, grateful that the light bulbs in ANBU headquarters were perpetually dim and thus hid any expressions that might make it to his face. His loose hair provided further cover, making the hassle of keeping it so long worth it. Other ANBU passed by the dark hallway, most doing an excellent job of pretending not to notice him. 

If there was ever a question about how little the council cared about Naruto’s training, he’d point out how easily he’d inserted himself back into ANBU’s ranks. The first week or so, he’d expected to be summoned to the Tower and told, in no uncertain terms, that being assigned a genin team wasn’t a joke. 

It hadn’t happened. 

Not even when he tracked down Ibiki to report all that he’d discovered about Akatsuki, and just by going to Otafaku Town, one of the outpost cities closest to Konoha. He suspected that he hadn’t imparted anything new, but Ibiki had simply nodded briskly without a word about Itachi’s genin. No one said anything when he cashed in the slips for leading a handful of ANBU missions, and his flat paycheck every two weeks still included the generous bonus for supposedly training a genin team. 

Message received. 

The Council, and perhaps even Hokage-sama, wanted him to keep an eye on Naruto (and Sasuke, maybe), but they could not care less about molding them into suitable weapons. Which suited Itachi just fine, actually. He couldn’t teach his way out of a paper bag, didn’t care enough to make himself better at it, and he’d much rather his brother stay as far away from politics as possible. 

Hoping for that last bit was no different than rolling a stone up a mountain, but Itachi needed something to sweep under the rug. 

The fight with that arsonist fool from Iwa had gone in his favor, and the team that had witnessed it probably returned to Konoha with more rumors to add to his legend, but Itachi couldn’t pretend that it hadn’t cost him. Or at least confirmed a few of his suspicions. He wished that he could convince himself that he had Eiji’s hyperbolic speech patterns to thank for the dramatic predictions about the future of his eyesight if he “continued with whatever the fuck you’re trying”. But he knew better. The more he used his Sharingan, the more his eyes hurt afterwards, and the more his vision blurred. 

Soft footsteps, too slow to belong to a harried ANBU, interrupted his thoughts.

Itachi opened his eyes and glanced to his left. Shimura Danzo paused about a foot away from him. Itachi's gaze passed over the dark kimono draped over the odd bulges of where his right arm should be, then he looked back at Boar's door. Only his cane remained in Itachi’s field of vision.

“We need to talk.”

“I have nothing new to say to you,” said Itachi.

“Is this where you want to test my boundaries, here of all places?”

Itachi was in no fucking mood for Danzo’s posturing. He never should have let the grimy old bastard cow him. 

Heedless of what it might cost him, he wrapped the entire floor in a red, mottled shroud. Not Tsukuyomi, but as much as his mundane genjutsu skills would allow.

“Don’t be foolish, boy,” said Danzo. The Root guards that followed him day and night slipped out of the shadows, movements sleek and sure. 

That was fine. The foul air Itachi had weaved out of nothingness was not for them.

“Stop this, or—”

“—Or what?” Itachi allowed himself a short snort. “You’ll try to arrest me, send assassins after me? Go after my brother. . . or Eiji, perhaps, since Sasuke is not a chip you’re willing to risk so early in the game?” 

“Or you’ll exhaust whatever patience the rest of the council and Sarutobi have left for you,” said Danzo, undeterred.

“I don’t think so,” said Itachi, looking directly at Danzo. 

The Root sentries tensed. Danzo waved them off.

“It’s you who’s exhausted everyone’s patience by meddling with Hyuuga affairs,” said Itachi. “If I killed you now, I’d probably get a slap on the wrist.”

One of the sentries’ knees bent. Itachi mirrored the entire hallway. The floor became the ceiling, right turned into left, everyone’s silhouette seemed to grow and shrink at odd angles. Not quite as flashy as stab wounds and racing hearts, but Itachi didn’t want them to scream. He hated it when his victims screamed. 

“How long will you maintain these little parlor tricks?” asked Danzo. “You cannot intimidate me with genjutsu, Itachi. I’m no child.”

He remembered Kakashi’s mission report, and Ibiki’s insistence that the “teleportation” had been a genjutsu. Itachi believed Kakashi, but he saw the merit in having opponents believe he could disappear. So he grabbed the part of Danzo’s brain that mapped his image and wiped it clean, certain that the red tinge he’d left on the world and the hallway’s dim light would mask any discrepancies in his illusion. 

“Things have changed, Danzo.” For the better, mostly, though Itachi barely felt it. “Konoha has clawed its way out of the hole it was in after the Third Secret War and the Fourth’s death. There’s not so many orphans for you to exploit. I’m not a desperate thirteen-year-old with torn loyalties anymore, and before I see you wearing a kage’s robes, I’ll see you dead.”

Boar’s door opened, sparing Danzo from having to come up with a retort that didn’t make him look weak in front of his minions. Itachi dropped the genjutsu, then looked at Boar placidly.

“What are you doing?” Boar asked.

“Danzo-sama had some questions about my skills,” said Itachi.

Boar looked around, and Itachi followed his gaze. Though he and Danzo seemed as relaxed as housewives at an afternoon tea, the two Root members looked a second away from pissing their pants. 

“Itachi, just go,” said Boar. 

Making sure to display a small smile, Itachi stood up. He bowed at Boar, then walked away at a leisurely pace. The air still seemed to be suffocating, even though Itachi had released his genjutsu. He should probably be feeling a little more apprehensive about his little display, but nothing he’d said to Danzo had been bullshit. The bastard put a target on his back the moment he tried to take advantage of the Hyuga’s feud. Itachi half-expected to be ordered to kill him at any moment.

He made it to his apartment just before midnight, feeling too jumpy for his tastes. Eiji was stuck at the hospital for the time being, and seeking out Anko would probably leave his mood in an even worse condition. Besides, she seemed to be done with him, and that was probably best for everyone. So he showered, and went to sleep.

Much to his shock, he slept like a rock. A rock that had vague nightmares that it couldn’t quite recall once the sun streamed through its window, but still. . . Either his insomnia was improving, or that measly genjutsu took more out of him than he realized. 

Since he had no specific plans for the day and Eiji had waved a terrifying schedule under his nose the last time Itachi went to visit him, he went straight to Training Ground Seven. A cool breeze passed over the pond and caressed the grass, as though the weather was in as good a mood as Itachi. It didn’t even faze him that Sasuke greeted him with the expected glare, and Naruto started buzzing about with complaints and run-on declarations about Wind Release that he’d gleaned from a scroll, or book, or whatever. The rest of the genin loitered around, talking among themselves. 

“Yes, of course,” said Itachi, when Naruto paused talking in front of him.

Naruto beamed at him, raising his arms. For a second, Itachi feared that he would be hugged, but Naruto just jumped around in celebration. 

Itachi replayed his last few words, “Are you taking us to lunch today?”, and couldn’t quite work out what was so exciting about that. 

“Naruto,” he said.

“Sensei, I did it!” Naruto rushed back to him, waving his fist in front of Itachi’s nose. He saw a tiny green leaf an instant before a wind blade cut it in half. “See! Without Shadow Clones, like you said!”

“Good job?” said Itachi. “But you need to do that with many leaves.”

“I want to go to a fancy ramen place to celebrate!” said Naruto.

“It’s not that big a deal,” said Tenten. “Stop acting like you’re on something weird.”

“That’s how he always acts,” said Sakura. 

“What about the med corp?” Itachi asked her, waving Naruto aside. “Were you evaluated?”

Sakura’s shoulders hunched, for reasons Itachi couldn’t glean since his tone had been perfectly neutral. “They haven’t gotten back to me.”

“They’ll probably go through all the chuunin who signed up first,” said Neji. “They have a better chance of finding people with potential there.”

“Right,” said Itachi. “Whose turn is it to spar with me?”

“Me, me!” yelled Naruto. “I’m gonna kill that clone with my new Wind Release Jutsu.”

“It’s not a jutsu yet,” said Itachi.

Tenten sighed.

His clone played around with Naruto and Tenten for a couple of hours while the other four went off to complete whatever missions were on the two D-rank scrolls Itachi picked in the morning. Itachi climbed one of the trees and meditated, paying particular attention to the chakra feeding his retinas with life. Even with his Sharingan deactivated, too much chakra flew towards them. If he wasn’t careful, his retinas would burn, scar, and atrophy. 

There was little he could do about that besides meditate. He meant to ignore almost everything he’d read in that stupid stone tablet.

For lunch, he took the genin to Konoha’s priciest steakhouse, ignoring Naruto’s complaints about ramen. Sakura slapped the back of his head and told him something or other about how he could eat ramen every stupid day if he wanted, and please shut up. A few patrons shot them ugly looks as they shambled through the restaurant, Naruto and Lee having some unspoken contest about which one could be more obnoxious, Neji and Sakura in wrinkled, damp clothes, and Tenten sporting old slacks patched with cloth that didn’t match.

Itachi smiled to himself. The owners were probably dying of happiness that a jounin was marching six genin into their establishment to treat them expensive food. He could have asked for the best seats in the place, and if anyone else was there, they’d have been ejected in a matter of minutes. When Naruto produced a kunai to slice through his steak, the waiter almost fainted.

“It’s not dirty, calm down,” Naruto said, as Tenten laughed and Sakura blushed. “That knife you gave me sucks.”

The meal calmed down for a bit, then someone snuck wasabi into Neji’s plate and the boy reacted as though he’d been poisoned. He downed a pitcher of water, then threw it in Lee’s direction. Lee caught it, then Itachi had to hold Neji back.

“I’m going to _kill_ you,” shouted Neji, scaring some poor middle-aged woman sitting at the next table.

Itachi chuckled, then caught Sasuke’s gaze. 

Sasuke had been smiling, or close to it, but meeting Itachi’s eyes made him tense for a brief second. Then he adopted a mechanically perfect posture and forced his face into a neutral expression.

“Let him go, Sensei,” said Lee, who rose and fell into a resting Strong Fist stance. “If he cannot handle a simple joke, then I can handle him.”

“Lee, sit down,” said Itachi, tightening his hold on Neji’s shoulder. “Neji, control yourself, or I’ll control you.” 

They both relaxed and shot each other dirty looks, as if to promise that their little spat wasn’t over. The waiter looked like she wanted to kiss Itachi. He could name at least two jounin who would let their genin wreck a restaurant, if someone was dumb enough to trust them with genin.

Itachi left a generous tip, then followed the genin back to Training Ground Seven. Neji and Lee will have cooled off by the following morning, and he needed to talk to Naruto anyway. He’d been putting it off long enough.

Tenten declared that it was about time they all head home when the sun started setting and the sky bled orange.

“Stay behind, Naruto,” he said. 

Sasuke pretended not to notice, but Naruto stared at him for a long moment before shuffling closer. Itachi waited until the other genin had gone, then let Naruto fidget next to him as he stared at the gravelly dirt between patches of grass. Itachi knew that if he waited long enough, the silence would force a stream of nonsense out of Naruto’s mouth, and hidden in that stream he might find his answers.

“If this is about the restaurant,” said Naruto, “then Neji and Lee were way more annoying than me.”

“It’s not about the restaurant.”

Naruto took a deep breath, then hugged his knees to his chest.

“It’s about our mission with Miss Eiko.”

Nothing. Naruto just buried his face between his knees and hugged himself tighter.

“Did Sasuke tell you to lie?”

“No!” Naruto jumped to his feet, then sat down again and slid over to Itachi to grab a hold of his arm. “I swear, Sensei, Sasuke didn’t tell me to do anything. He just wanted to make sure I didn’t get into trouble.”

“Why would you get into trouble?”

“Because. . . because.” Naruto’s eyes filled with tears. He buried his face in his elbow and sniffed.

Itachi fought with a curious mix of distress and annoyance. Watching Naruto cry was akin to watching a kitten get stepped on, but he hadn’t even _done_ anything yet. No threats, not even admonishments. He didn’t want Naruto hysterical.

“Naruto, I’m not angry.” That was actually true. “I just need to know what happened.”

“I broke Sasuke’s arm,” admitted Naruto in a small voice.

“Yes, I know.”

Naruto looked up so fast that Itachi worried his neck might have gotten a whiplash injury.

“I meant, what happened with the Kyuubi.”

“Um. . . I g-got really scared because the girl was gonna kill us, so then the Kyuubi’s chakra came to me.” He shrugged and looked away.

No shinobi should be so terrible at lying. 

“What if I tell you what I think happened, and you tell me if I’m wrong,” said Itachi.

Naruto stared, then nodded.

“Sasuke did or said something that made you angry, either before or after you tried to use the Kyuubi’s chakra, and then you attacked him. Probably after you’d eliminated the attacker.” He waited, but Naruto remained frozen. Itachi doubted he was breathing. “Then Sasuke awakened his Sharingan, possibly after you broke his arm, and the shock of it helped you come to your senses. And then Sasuke told you to lie.”

“He just said to lie so I wouldn’t get into trouble,” insisted Naruto. “Sasuke’s my friend, and he knows I saved him from that girl.”

“What did he say that upset you?”

“He told that girl that he would go with her, and that he didn’t care if I died,” said Naruto, shaking his head. “But he only did that to buy time; he didn’t mean it. It’s _your_ fault, actually. If you’d come sooner, then Sasuke wouldn’t have needed to lie and I wouldn’t have broken his arm.”

“Did he say that too?” asked Itachi, chuckling to himself. 

“No!” But Naruto looked away as he said it. Another lie. “I told you, Sasuke was just trying to protect me.”

“Have you discussed the Kyuubi since the mission?”

“No, no.” Naruto shook his head vigorously, then looked back at him. “I’m trying really hard, Sensei, I promise. I’m gonna get really good with my own chakra so I never have to use the red chakra, and I won’t hurt Sasuke, or any of my friends ever, _ever_ again. I promise.”

“Alright,” said Itachi. He’d gotten all he could out of Naruto without using more unpleasant methods. “You can go.”

“What about Sasuke?”

“I’ll talk to him later.” It would be like pouring boiling salt water on an open wound, but it had to be done.

“Wait, that’s it?” said Naruto, all contrite regret melting off him like shaved ice dropped onto a boiling pot. “I tell you my evil monster thing almost killed Sasuke, and you’re not gonna _do_ anything? You’re not gonna _teach_ me anything?”

“Naruto—”

“—Don’t _Naruto_ me in that shitty tone.” He let out an angry breath that turned into a growl. “Look, we all get it. You hate this jounin-sensei gig, and you don’t want to do it, and no one’s making you. That blows for us, but fine, whatever. But I’m not asking for a jutsu; I’m asking you to help me not _hurt people_. If you’re not gonna help, then at least point me at anyone who could at least try.” 

That was a fantasy. Itachi had little knowledge of bijuu, just some vague legends that the Sharingan could control them. He’d been assigned Naruto as a genin in case he needed to be neutralized, not to teach him anything.

“Don’t just fucking stare at me! It’s annoying enough the rest of the time, but this is fucking serious.”

“I have some ideas on how to help you,” said Itachi. “But you won’t like any of them.”

Mercurial as ever, Naruto beamed and grabbed his wrist. “Whatever it is, no matter how much it sucks, I promise I’ll do it, Itachi-sensei. Anything to get this thing under control.”

“Then I need some time to prepare,” said Itachi. The kind of genjutsu for what he had in mind required an in-depth wealth of knowledge about the target that Itachi just didn’t have for Naruto, mostly because he’d been deliberately not paying close attention to the kid for months. “You’ll have to answer some uncomfortable questions about yourself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02) for beta-reading again!

The med-chuunin showed up almost a week after Sakura signed up, long after she’d convinced herself that the med corp had filled its ranks with other chuunin. Sakura had a second to panic about how she hadn’t prepared, and how did anyone even know where she was, and how she wasn’t even dressed for any kind of formal evaluation, etc. Then she’d walked away from the pond to answer a short list of questions about who exactly she was besides “the girl in Itachi’s team”. And not one question about why she wanted to be a medic.

“Your Academy eval says your taijutsu blows,” said the medic, without looking up from the scroll that Sakura assumed had her teeny ninja profile. “What are you doing about that?”

“Oh, I’m working really hard to improve,” said Sakura, though her head was still screaming. “I’ve been training with Hyuuga Neji,” she added, gesturing towards the pond.

Mostly, they tried to weave their chakra through water next to each other, but the med-chuunin didn’t need to know that. As luck would have it, Neji was in the middle of doing some impressive crap with the pond. Long tendrils of water glinting where sunlight hit them flowed around him, at one point seeming to envelop him in a brief rainbow. If Itachi hadn’t disappeared again, Neji might be getting that prized jutsu out of him.

“Can you do that?”

“Sure,” said Sakura, choosing to interpret ‘that’ as ‘Water Release’, which she could do, though not as well as Neji.

“Where’s Itachi?”

“Sometimes, he has to leave early,” said Sakura. Another truth, even if that particular day, Itachi hadn’t shown up at all. “Classified business, with Hokage-sama. Probably.”

The med-chuunin looked at her with an “oh, really” arch to her eyebrows. Sakura spared a moment to be grateful that Neji had said something about needing quiet and banished their teams from the immediate vicinity of the pond. Undoubtedly, Naruto would have jumped at the opportunity to complain about Itachi to a new audience, and she didn’t need the med-chuunin to know that her training was inadequate, to say the least.

“Alright,” said the med-chuunin, rifling through her bag. “Let’s do a few simple exercises.”

Sakura did a crappy job sewing up a cut on a pig foot, and she botched the search for the med-chuunin’s pulse points because she was so nervous. Somehow, she managed to screw up the one chakra manipulation exercise as well. The med-chuunin handed her a sheet of paper stretched between two thin bamboo sticks and marked with a zig-zagging line, then told her to cut through it with her chakra.

“Did anyone get this?” she asked, glaring at the twisting line.

“He probably could,” said the med-chuunin, looking at Neji. “It’s a test of precision and control.”

Great, awesome. That was just what Sakura needed to hear.

The med-chuunin left with the ninja equivalent of “don’t call us, we’ll call you”, and Sakura stalked back to Neji, trying to hold on to the bitter anger that she knew for certain was the only reason she didn’t burst into tears.

“That bad, huh?” asked Neji, without opening his eyes.

Sakura kicked water at his face.

He didn’t even bother to dodge, but he opened his eyes. “That was stupid.”

Sakura rushed at him, ready to kick him for real. He moved out of the way, without rising, and continued crawling away from her attempted strikes. The veins feeding his eyes didn’t bulge, because he obviously didn’t need his fancy eyeballs to get away from her. And, of course, he smirked.

“I could do this until you pass out and drown,” said Neji, but he was crouching rather than sitting on the surface of the pond.

It could only mean that Sakura was getting the upper hand. She let out a yell and curled her hand into a fist, intending to hit him with all the momentum and upper body strength she could muster.

She didn’t quite track what happened next, but she ended up with her right arm hanging limply at her side. It was like her triceps had fallen asleep in an instant.

“Stop it,” said Neji from behind her. “You can’t get stress relief by beating up someone blatantly stronger than you. Go find some Academy student if you want someone to bully.”

Sakura’s knees hit the surface of the pond. She sniffed.

“Oh, come on,” said Neji. “Your arm will be fine in thirty minutes or so.”

“That’s not the problem,” said Sakura. “I just can’t do anything right. And I’m _not_ a bully.”

“You’re not strong enough to be a bully,” said Neji. “And stop crying. Our teammates are coming, and the last thing we need is to make them start fighting because they think I made you cry. Get a hold of yourself.”

She managed to convince everyone that Neji hit her arm during a proper spar. Naruto was suspicious, but since she and Neji had seemed to get along so far, he didn’t push it. Sasuke just didn’t care one way or the other, or so Sakura assumed.

Her parents tried to talk to her at dinner later that night, but Sakura indulged in more sulking. Her arm still hurt, despite what Neji had said, like she’d put too much weight on it. At least there was no bruise. She figured she ought to apologize to Neji since she had tried to take her frustrations out on him. But she wasn’t a bully. She’d never have tried to hit him if she thought, for an instant, that she’d _actually_ be able to hurt him.

“Whatever, it’s forgotten,” said Neji the next day. “It’s our turn to spar against that clone, right? I’ve been watching it enough that I’m pretty sure I can beat it.”

Yeah, just like he’d been pretty sure he’d crack Nature Transformation in a matter of days, almost two weeks ago. Sakura spared a second to envy his unshakable self-confidence, then went back to the water.

Itachi didn’t show up again, so that day was pretty uneventful. She went home in a better mood, having reassured herself that even if she couldn’t join the med corp now, she still had her entire career ahead of her. How many twelve-year-olds were recruited for any specialized units, anyway? Barring clan brats?

“Sakura!” her mother called when she tried to sneak straight to her room upon getting home. “A ninja left something for you this afternoon. Looked pretty official.”

One, she should probably be able to sneak past her civilian mother, but two, it was nice that she wasn’t gonna miss whatever that “ninja” had left for her. Sakura thought it would be some kind of scam, so she almost fainted when she read the matter-of-fact orders.

_You’ve been selected for the medical corpus. Report at the Hospital, Room H-311, Tuesday at 700 hours. Your CO has been informed._

* * *

She was one of three genin at the Hospital, Room H-311. The other two were Hinata and an older white-haired boy who could’ve passed for a chuunin at any civilian bar or restaurant.

“The chuunin exams are just really hard, I guess,” said Yakushi Kabuto, scratching the back of his head as he smiled nervously.

Sakura hadn’t been rude enough to bring up his status as a genin, but she’d been wondering. She’d sort of been hoping it was something else, like maybe a sick team member, or other random things that had prevented him from taking the test.

“What about you guys?” he asked, adjusting his glasses. “Did you always plan to try for the med corp?”

“No,” said Hinata, looking out the window. “I just. . . That big jounin said the village really needs medics. And my eyes c-could be useful.”

“I was thinking about it,” said Sakura, “but I thought I’d have to wait until after I was a chuunin.”

“Yeah, I get that,” said Kabuto. “Not sure how I got picked, to be honest. There’s a reason I’m still a genin.”

Sakura bet that Hinata had been selected thanks to her Byakugan, but she couldn’t begin to guess why they’d picked her. She looked around the conference room, searching for a friendly face, but found only older chuunin with weary eyes and softening physiques. Almost all women. Career chuunin, if she’d ever seen them. It seemed like not even an automatic salary boost had lured the more accomplished combatants to the med corp. Was the training really so rigorous, or was Sakura just judging a bunch of books by their covers?

The double doors to the conference room swung open while Sakura speculated. Her back straightened before she saw the big medic push his way in, arms occupied with a tray brimming with steak, a large serving of potatoes, and one of those huge sugary drinks that Sakura’s mom wouldn’t touch for fear of getting fat.

“Oh, a Hyuuga!” he said, beaming as he looked at Hinata.

Of course. Sakura wished she wasn’t so petty about it, since it _was_ true that the Byakugan was a blessing for any sick person. If it was her parents in the hospital, she’d want Hinata’s eyes on them.

“I’m Eiji,” said the large medic as he placed the tray on the desk in front of the blackboard. “Most of you probably know me from the announcement. . . or rumors. Probably not from ANBU. Anyway, I’m the jounin in charge of the emergency room for now, so I’m getting most of the new trainees.”

“So you’re our jounin-sensei while we’re here?” asked Kabuto.

Eiji reared back. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m your CO. That’s less pressure.” He sighed, edging back to the double doors. “Ah shit, did no one get your papers? I’ll be right back.”

“I hear he’s a mess,” said Kabuto the moment Eiji’s steps faded down the hallway. “He only got promoted because of your sensei, right?”

“I don’t know,” said Sakura. “Itachi-sensei doesn’t strike me as the type to pull strings for anyone.” Not that she spent that much time with the irresponsible bastard, but she couldn’t imagine him. . . what? Forcing someone to promote his boyfriend? Blackmailing them? How did such things even work?

“My uncle Jian says he’s an excellent surgeon,” said Hinata. Then she glanced at the floor. “But nothing else that’s nice.”

Eiji burst back into the room with a stack of papers that reached his nose, and all gossip died. “This is mostly stuff you guys have to memorize,” he said, “but there’s two forms about increasing your pay, which is probably why most of you 're here.” He slid the stack of papers onto the desk, then turned to face them. “Now, the most important thing to learn today: when is it alright to interrupt me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02) for beta-reading!

“So, how’s the medical thing going?” Naruto remembered to ask after she’d completed her third shift in the ER.

“Great,” said Sakura, mostly honest. For once. She did feel useful there, even if it wasn’t in a manner that would impress her teammates.

“Cool, awesome,” said Naruto. “Now you’ll be able to heal us during missions.”

“It’ll be years before she gets to that point,” said Neji. “If she ever does.”

That was true, but he didn’t need to put it quite like that. 

Sakura sighed, taking comfort in the way the water rippled beneath her. With the summer getting angrier, all six of them had taken to spending lunch time and all training breaks as close to the waterfall as possible. Some of Neji’s hair had escaped its rubber band and floated off as far as it could. A lock brushed Sakura’s fingertips, though they were far from close to each other. He had very long hair, for a boy. 

“Speaking of things that might never happen,” said Sasuke, “is your jounin coming back anytime soon?”

“It’s been more than a month,” said Tenten, sighing. “I hope he’s alright.”

“Of course he is!” said Lee. Unlike the rest of them, he swam to keep himself afloat, declaring that if they passively worked on their chakra manipulation during breaks, then he would passively work on his endurance. “Guy-sensei is unstoppable!”

“No one’s unstoppable,” said Neji. “And. . .” 

“Neji, do you know what mission he is on?” asked Lee, swimming closer to him. “Tell us, please.”

“I just have a guess,” said Neji. “He’s gone with Hatake Kakashi, so. . .” Neji shrugged. “I can’t say much. Intelligence would have my head.”

“Oh, why would you tease us like that?” asked Naruto. “Now I’m gonna bug you until you spill. Who’s this Kakashi, first of all?”

“A famous jounin,” said Tenten. “Neji went on a mission with him last month, got half the S-rank reward, and refused to tell us anything about it.”

“I told you, it’s classified,” said Neji. “I didn’t even tell Guy-sensei until he got clearance for it.”

“Wait, you went on a mission with a _famous jounin_?” asked Naruto, gazing at Neji with figurative stars in his eyes.

“You do realize Itachi’s pretty famous himself?” said Neji.

Sakura needed to steer the conversation in another direction. Quick. She sat up.

“He could be the Fourth reincarnated and I wouldn’t care,” said Naruto. “Fucker doesn’t show up to train us. He was supposed to help me with something, but is he here? Fucking no.”

“Itachi was like five when the Fourth died,” said Tenten.

“So, I saw a person who shoved a bottle of deodorant up their butt at the hospital,” said Sakura. 

As expected, everyone but Sasuke and Neji broke into a fit of snickering. Naruto demanded a detailed retelling of the incident, all thoughts of Itachi and other famous jounin forgotten. Sakura thought that she saw Sasuke relax a little bit, but she was probably imagining it. 

Though she’d only spent three days at the hospital, and one was on the weekend, she felt like she didn’t see much of her team anymore. Teams. Whatever. ER shifts were _twelve hours long_. That was _half a day_ , which sounded obvious, but Sakura hadn’t understood what it meant until she’d completed her first seven-hundred hours to nineteen-hundred hours shift. She’d gotten home in a daze, eaten and not tasted a thing, and then passed out until training with Neji the next day. 

It would be easier if Eiji wasn’t—and Sakura had searched for more diplomatic words to express this, but they didn’t exist—an _asshole_.

“Pink One.” Apparently, “Sakura” was just too complex a name for him. “Go recheck seven’s vitals, and if they’re good, kick her out.”

“But Sensei,” Sakura tried, wishing she could whisper and still be heard over the din of conversations, tears, and monitors beeping along in the ER. “She’s got nowhere to go. Her boyfriend—”

“—I wasn’t asking for your recommendations, Flower Name,” interrupted Eiji. “There’s fifty people in the waiting room, and I need that bed. This is not a shelter.” He walked away off to one of the stretchers with an unconscious patient before Sakura could argue further.

At her level, she could only see patients that weren’t in critical condition (or, as Eiji liked to call them, bullshit patients). It amounted to people with the sniffles and mild injuries, drunks, junkies, and hypochondriacs. On more exciting occasions, she got to talk to chronic patients who missed out on their clinic appointments, or chronic patients presenting with “acute exacerbations”, which were different depending on what their illness was. 

“I’m sorry,” Sakura said once she made it to the seventh stretcher. Hari, the thin girl huddled under the worn white sheets, sniffled. “My boss says you have to go.”

She didn’t bother to check Hari’s vitals because they’d been normal the last two times she’d done so, and she didn’t want to risk Eiji coming in to check them himself if she lied to him a third time. 

“It’s the big guy, right?” said Hari, pushing the sheet off. “Wish he was ugly so I could hate him more.”

Sakura grunted, then moved on to the next patient. Eiji’s looks were nothing to her now. In fact, he was kind of ugly with all the frowning and being nasty to everyone for no reason, and walking around with enough bulk for two men. Itachi had terrible taste, and that didn’t surprise her at all. 

She consoled herself with a reminder that as much as Eiji seemed to hate her, at least he didn’t look like he wanted to literally kick her out of the ER whenever she talked to him. Which was how he looked at poor Hinata. 

“Hyuuga, I don’t know how many times I have to tell you this,” he heard Eiji telling Hinata as she walked past them. “‘I’m not sure’ is useless information. It’s not even information. ‘I’m not sure’ means ‘Eiji, go push your searing hot chakra into this kid’s gash to make fucking sure there’s nothing in there’. So, I ask again, is there a foreign body in that wound?”

“I’m n-not sure.”

Sakura didn’t need to glance up to imagine the look on Eiji’s face. And, yes, she conceded that Hinata’s indecision about everything could be annoying, but Eiji seemed to have it in for her from day one. He’d demanded that she take off her jacket because “it’s the middle of summer, you’re gonna get blood and other nasty shit on that fur, and I’m getting hives just looking at you”. The white med-nin’s coat was loose, but thin and mostly open at the front, so Hinata had to deal with walking around without hiding most of her silhoutte. 

No one cared except for Hinata herself, and jeering drunks, but Sakura could tell that Hinata was uncomfortable. She thought about mentioning it to Eiji, but it was embarrassing. And also none of her business. Hinata could tell him herself if it was that important to her. Or one of the many female med-chuunin walking around. Sakura had to focus on her patients if she had any hope of working as fast as Eiji demanded.

“Where’s the other one?” asked Eiji, sliding the curtain open while Sakura took an old woman’s blood pressure. “The old one with white hair?”

“His name’s Kabuto,” said Sakura. 

Eiji stared, big grey eyes narrowed.

“And I don’t know.”

“I’m here!” Kabuto strode towards them, taking off a pair of bloody gloves. At some point while Sakura talked to patient after patient, someone had taught him to suture wounds with needles and silk. 

“There’s a moron in bed fifteen who punched a window because his best friend banged his wife or something,” said Eiji. “He’s got three lacs on his right forearm, and another on his right eyebrow—flying glass—and he’s clean. Come, I’ll anesthetize for you.” 

Sakura smiled at the old woman, then put away the cuff and trailed behind Kabuto. Eiji would never seek her out to teach her anything, but he didn’t mind if she followed him around and observed him quietly. He might even like it, since she always made sure to have saline, gauze, and clean needles on hand. 

“Where’s Hyuuga?” asked Eiji, once they reached bed fifteen. 

“I’m not sure,” said Sakura, looking at the young man with the bloody forearm and small but wide eyebrow gash.

“Go get her then,” said Eiji, pulling a transparent vial out of his pocket. 

If he was about to ask Hinata to look at the wounds with her Byakugan, then things were going to get unpleasant. Still, Sakura could hardly contradict him, so she went off to search for Hinata. There was no sign of her among the med-chuunin scattered about giving people shots and performing musculoskeletal exams that Sakura only recognized because she’d read about them. Sakura dreaded another Eiji explosion, so she rushed for the bathroom in the hallway just outside the ER.

“Hinata?” she said after knocking. “Eiji’s asking for you.”

Nothing. 

Sakura went back to the ER, cut between a couple of drunks slurring at each other in the hallway, and then went behind the med-chuunin station where everyone handled stock and paperwork. The only hiding place besides the bathroom was the supply closet, a cellblock of a room beyond a table with two beat-up coffee makers behind a fridge filled with ice packs, antibiotics, and saline. Hinata was huddled behind a tall stack of clean urinals, and looked up only when Sakura knocked lightly on the shelf.

“Eiji. . .” 

Hinata rubbed her eyes. The redness that came over them after crying stood out in stark contrast to the pale irises of the Byakugan.

“I’ll just tell him I didn’t find you,” said Sakura.

“N-no,” said Hinata, rubbing her eyes and squaring her shoulders. “It’s just words. I can h-handle him.”

Sakura sighed, certain that Hinata’s determination would crumble under Eiji’s naked vitriol, but who was she to discourage her old classmate? She followed Hinata out of the storage room, grabbing a pack of dry gauze and several four-by-fours just in case the drawers beside bed fifteen hadn’t been restocked since the last shift. 

“Don’t look like I’m gonna kill you, Hyuuga,” Eiji said when they got to him. “We’ve already established you can’t look at anything for shit, but I assume you can pour water on things?”

“Yes, sir,” said Hinata. No stutter, but maybe she was just relieved that Eiji wasn’t asking complicated-sounding stuff like ‘How’s the collateral circulation around the arches?’

Someone had to explain to the bastard that just because a Hyuuga could see something, it didn’t mean that they had the vocabulary to describe what it was they were seeing.

“Shit, man,” said the patient, cringing as Kabuto loaded a curved needle into a pair of forceps. “You’re not gonna do the chakra thing?”

“The chakra thing isn’t for dumb assholes with superficial cuts they inflicted on themselves,” said Eiji. 

“I’m gonna scar!”

“Oh, I’m sorry about your modelling career,” said Eiji, and what was the point of that? “Sakura.”

“Yes, sir?” She would be flattered that he used her name, but it was so common that he’d probably just stumbled on it by accident.

“Go make sure we’ve got new people on beds seven, one, and twenty,” he ordered as Hinata opened up bottles of saline. “Take histories and report to Kaisha, Kimiko, and Kana; come get me if anything looks too serious.”

Oh, great. He might not like Hinata, but at least she got to do things besides talk to people and then report the conversation to real medics. Still, Sakura’s primary motivation was to be useful, and someone had to go and gather all the information from the patients. She tried to look at it as a game, though one that was impossible to win. Could she clean out the waiting room? Of course not, since villagers would keep coming for as long as there was a village, but she could always try.

She met up with Kabuto and Hinata at the end of their shift, though not intentionally. They just happened to be done with their last patients at the same time, and they shambled to the same wide exit. Only Kabuto seemed cheerful despite the dark bags under his eyes, perhaps because Eiji seemed to. . . not hate him. Sakura would call it a sexist plot, but she had to admit that Kabuto had a very steady hand, and no bodily fluid, no matter what kind, seemed to faze him.

“I’ll see you guys in a couple of days,” he told them at the first crossroad near the hospital. “Hang in there, Hinata. His bark is worse than his bite.”

Sakura wanted to talk to Hinata, but they weren’t close or anything, so Kabuto going off on his own didn’t make it any easier. She knew that if it was her, she wouldn’t want anyone blatantly pointing out that she was sucking.

“He’s really unreasonable, you know,” said Sakura a few minutes later, encouraged by the night’s tepid wind. “But it looks like he’s gonna let you do things that have nothing to do with your eyes now.”

“I can pour water, I guess.”

Sakura chuckled, though she wasn’t sure if that had been a joke. “It’s still something besides talking to people.”

“Talking is important,” said Hinata. “If he lets you talk, it means he trusts you.”

“Huh?”

“He only lets the chuunin see patients alone,” said Hinata. “And he doesn’t interrupt when you’re telling him what the patients told you. Not even Kabuto gets to report to the chuunin by himself.”

Before Sakura could process that, Naruto’s voice pierced the air.

“Sakura! Found you!” He poofed into smoke the moment Sakura noticed him. Shadow Clone. 

“Well, he’s been saying the three of us should go to Ichiraku’s for a good month now,” said Sakura. “Us and Sasuke, I mean.”

“It must be nice to have him on your team,” said Hinata, smiling.

Sakura opened her mouth to argue, but then she realized that Hinata was right and smiled. Things were looking up, in more ways than one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02) for beta-reading!

“Itachi-sensei taught us a jutsu yesterday!” Naruto told her after another shift at the ER.

“What?” Sakura boggled. Did Naruto finally wear him down?

“Well,” said Tenten, “he taught Neji a Water Release Jutsu, and we got to watch.”

Trust Itachi to remember that he had some duties towards them while Sakura was away. 

“It was _awesome!_ ” Naruto bounced on the balls of his feet, happy as if the technique had been for him. “Sensei made a fucking _dragon_ out of water! It flew up the waterfall, and like, reached the clouds, and it rained for a few seconds.”

“Hyuuga made that dragon’s baby,” said Sasuke.

“But I made one,” said Neji. “How’s the Lightning Release going, by the way?”

He was kind enough, or just proud enough, to show Sakura the technique (the awesomely-named Water Dragon Bullet Jutsu). Gleaming water gathered from the pond, took the outline of an old-timey-looking dragon, then slammed itself against the grass and ripped through the ground. Sakura stared at the destructive track it left behind, and wondered what Itachi’s dragon had done that made Neji’s look like a “baby”.

“I didn’t realize Itachi could do cool shit,” said Naruto. Then his grin melted into an angry frown. “Kinda makes me dislike him even more. He could be teaching us cool jutsu, but he just doesn’t care.”

Tenten opened her mouth, then sighed and shook her head. “He has a point.”

“I do not understand why he is so lazy,” said Lee. “Guy-sensei came to training daily, sparred with us daily, and gave us advice daily.”

Sakura dared to hope that once Guy-sensei returned and his team complained to him about Itachi, someone somewhere might reprimand Itachi into actually doing his job. It was an embarrassment that she’d learned more taijutsu from Neji’s pity-teaching in between boring bouts of meditation with water. She might have a better chance of improving her skills if she didn’t have to pray for the stars to align so that at least three conditions were met: that Itachi showed up to training, in the mood to teach, while she wasn’t at a hospital shift. 

She would miss Neji when Might Guy returned. Since Gentle Fist moves were easy enough to render painless and near-harmless without enhancing them with chakra, she could lose sparring session after sparring session after sparring session to him without going home bruised and hurting. Even better, Neji was a great taijutsu instructor, able to point out openings in her defenses and verbalize exactly what she was doing wrong, and when.

“You run through the basic katas just fine,” he’d told her the first day they sparred, “but it’s like you don’t realize that a real opponent won’t stand still like a dummy so you can hit them.”

Sakura would argue against that, but it was probably true, so she nodded and tried to put the choreographed moves out of her mind. If her form suffered for it, then so be it.

“You’re a pretty good teacher, you know?” Sakura said, after a couple of hours of chasing after him, trying to predict where he would strike next, and taking note while he warned her of her blind spots and critiqued her inability to redirect or abandon an attack when it was obvious that he would dodge it.

“I help train my cousins sometimes,” said Neji.

Sakura opened her mouth, then closed it and bit her lower lip. Maybe Hinata wouldn’t appreciate it if Sakura announced to her clan’s prodigy that she was struggling at the hospital. Their being cousins meant little since the Hyuuga clan was so big. Maybe they didn’t even know each other.

“Do you know Hinata?” 

“She’s my first cousin,” said Neji, with a little chuckle. “More like my sister, actually. Our fathers were identical twins.”

“Oh,” said Sakura, relieved. If she had a brother like Neji, then she’d make him help her with everything all the time. “You know she’s struggling at the ER, right?”

“I can imagine,” said Neji. 

Yeah, anyone who knew Hinata probably saw the confidence issues instantly. “I think it’s because Eiji is so rude and impatient, and Hinata strikes me as the quiet, cautious type. But we have pretty standard reporting protocols and the patients get kinda repetitive. If she just practiced the scripts with someone she knows and trusts, then I bet she could do the reports quick enough that Eiji wouldn’t get tired and just walk away from her.”

“Is that so?” asked Neji.

“Yeah,” said Sakura, nodding. “And she needs to talk to him to learn. I thought it was BS at first, but I realized I was picking up things just by noticing what Eiji would think is important, and by trying to predict what he would need for different patients. But he’s just got Hinata running the most grunt work of errands, and it all needs to get done, don’t get me wrong, but taking care of just grunt work won’t make anyone a medic.” 

“Probably not,” agreed Neji.

“So will you help her?” If Neji was willing to help Sakura, then surely he’d jump at the chance to help his own cousin, right?

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

But Hinata didn’t improve after that. If anything, she seemed to get worse. Her hands shook whenever Eiji asked her to focus a light for him, she couldn’t go on restocking runs without forgetting at least one thing she was supposed to replenish, and she couldn’t pass messages from chuunin to chuunin without fumbling details. 

And still, Hinata showed up for every shift like clockwork. 

Sometimes, Sakura wondered how she found the strength to keep going when most people either pitied her, or outright disliked her for her apparent incompetence. Sakura knew that in her place, she’d have quit by the second day.

“You should start keeping some things in your pockets,” Sakura told her during lunch a few shifts later. Around them, the buzz of conversations among medics, recently-discharged patients, and visiting family members carried on like an organic concert. “The medics are always asking for gauzes, alcohol, four-by-fours, tape, scalpels, and clean needles. They’re really grateful if you buzz around them with stuff they need.”

“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” said Kabuto, who’d taken to sitting with them sometimes. Once, he’d even shown them basic stitching skills on super-rare steak. Sakura had asked where he’d gotten so good, but he’d just smiled, embarrassed, and said that he learned to sew and re-sew his clothes because he couldn’t afford new ones on a genin’s salary. “And if you can’t be faster,” he continued, “then try to surveil the room so you can warn people if a patient is going south. Or about to get violent.” 

“Oh, and about the Byakugan,” said Sakura. “It’ll be easier to answer some questions if you learn some anatomy.”

“Nobody asks me to use my Byakugan anymore,” said Hinata, eyes cast downward. She hunched more than usual when she couldn’t wear her bulky coat, as if trying to make herself smaller.

“Hinata-san,” said Kabuto, smiling gently. “It’s because they don’t want to waste time. I’m getting the feeling that time is the most pressing concern here, and that might be why the medics resent you. Normally, a Byakugan would help focus them, at the very least, not to mention conserve chakra.”

“They r-resent me?” Hinata shrunk in on herself further.

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Sakura, though now that Kabuto laid it out like that, she saw that maybe. . . Yeah, they did. While none of the med-chuunin were as blatant about it as Eiji, they all seemed to be excluding Hinata as much as possible. “And I’ve been thinking about it, and if you learned some anatomy, you might be able to answer their questions.” 

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” asked Kabuto kindly. “You didn’t understand what they were asking half the time. It wouldn’t have been easy enough to say if a person’s insides looked normal or not?”

“Everyone looks different on the inside,” said Hinata, shaking her head.

“But there’s normal different, and abnormal different,” insisted Kabuto.

Hinata practically squirmed on the spot.

“So anyway,” said Sakura, going for bright enthusiasm, “I think you just need a little practice, and maybe a little help from someone who has a Byakugan.” 

“All my cousins in the med corp are very busy,” said Hinata. “I wouldn’t want to bother them.”

“Oh, I know your cousin Neji isn’t the slightest bit busy,” said Sakura. “He’s with our team, and our sensei barely remembers to give us D-rank missions most days. Neji’s so bored he’s been helping me with taijutsu.”

“Then perhaps you should ask him for help, Hinata,” said Kabuto, nodding at Sakura. “He’s not a medic, but I hear he’s some kind of genius. Give him an anatomy textbook, and Eiji might just ask Hokage-sama personally to get Neji into the med corp.”

“I-I need to go,” said Hinata, jumping out of her seat as it’d scalded her. “I’m s-sorry.”

“But you didn’t finish your lunch,” Sakura told her retreating back.

“Let her go,” said Kabuto. “Some people aren’t cut out for anything. I should know. This is my fifth year as a genin.”

Well, Sakura wasn’t about to just accept that and keep her head down. Not for herself, and not even for Hinata, though they were far from close. Hinata kept coming to her shifts despite all her struggles, which was more than could be said for almost every other ninja who’d been given a chance to try out for the med corp. That had to count for something, didn’t it? Maybe Hinata wasn’t the type to grab a tiger by the ears, so to speak. Sakura could sympathize.

“Hey, I want to practice my reporting skills,” she told Hinata as they headed home, after Kabuto had gone his own way just so they had extra privacy. “You know, get faster at it.”

“A-alright.”

“Yeah,” said Sakura, satisfied that Hinata was on board. “I’ve been at it long enough that I’ve picked up the information Eiji and the med-chuunin always want from patients, depending on what they’re complaining about. I’ll bring my notes next time, then we can pretend to be sick for each other. With Kabuto, we’ve got enough people to roleplay a patient and a CO.” 

Sakura’s good mood lasted until the next morning, when she made it to Training Ground Seven to find Naruto beside himself with happiness. It seemed that Itachi had shown up while she was gone again, and _again_ he’d chosen to teach a jutsu while Sakura wasn’t around to see it. 

“I can make air bullets now!” Naruto jumped up and down, streamed through a bunch of hand seals until he landed at bird, then let out a big exhale.

Sakura barely felt anything, and saw even less, but dry pseudo-scorch marks appeared on the grass, linear and fanning out like rays of light. One of them bisected the mark left behind by Neji’s water dragon a few days before, cutting through the tiny blades of grass that had already started blossoming there. Sakura willed herself to be happy for Naruto, something that she wouldn’t have had to do if she were just a little less petty deep down. 

“Finally, a real jutsu!” said Naruto. “I thought Bastard Senior would never be good for anything, but here we go. He said this jutsu is good for crowd control.”

“Bastard Senior?” asked Sakura.

“Huh?” Naruto looked at her. “Oh, I guess I just noticed that Sasuke and Itachi-sensei look a lot alike. Anyway—”

“—Just don’t call him that in front of Sasuke,” said Sakura.

“Eh? Why not?” asked Naruto. 

Sakura didn’t have the first idea of how to handle this. “I just have a hunch that Sasuke wouldn’t want to be compared to Itachi.”

“Yeah. . .” breathed Naruto. “But why not? Isn’t everyone always saying that Itachi’s the biggest badass in the village?”

“That’s probably something you should talk to Sasuke about.”

“I’ve tried,” said Naruto, snorting. “But bring up Itachi and Sasuke clams up like a. . . clam. I need a better metaphor thing for that.”

“You mean simile,” said Sakura. Then she sighed. “You could always just read Itachi’s public profile, you know?”

“If the answer’s there, then Sasuke probably doesn’t want me to read it, does he?”

“No,” agreed Sakura. “Probably not. But it is public information.”

They spotted Team Guy making their way to the pond then, and the conversation died off. If Sakura were in Naruto’s place. . . Well, she’d never be in Naruto’s place because the first thing she’d done after being assigned to a genin squad had been to gather as much information about her jounin-sensei as possible. 

Two days later, after coaxing Neji to teach her the hand seals for the water dragon thing, if nothing else, Sakura returned for another shift at the hospital. A night shift that time, one that would cost her almost two days of non-training with her team due to scheduling conflicts. She’d selected her best-organized notes to share with Hinata and Kabuto during their dinner break. 

Eiji waited for them perched on the high chair reserved for the chief medical officer in the ER, looking a second away from toppling over and napping.

“It’s only you three now,” he said, rubbing his eyes roughly as he yawned. “Three dead surgeons, and three barely-functional genin to replace them. What a shitshow.”

“Maybe if you were nicer, more recruits would’ve stayed,” said Sakura. Her heart started racing before she’d even gotten the sentence out.

“Oh, Flower Petal,” said Eiji, with another yawn. “You wound me with that harsh criticism.”

Sakura bit her tongue, bristling as Kabuto failed to suppress a laugh beside her. To hell with them—

—The alarm that blared whenever a severe trauma arrived at the hospital interrupted her next admonishment.

“Fuck,” breathed Eiji, as one of the med-chuunin on paramedic duty burst through the door that lead through the trauma bay.

“Eiji,” she called. “We got a training accident. One of Itachi’s genin got a pretty bad head injury.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been busy with work stuff this week, so I haven't had a chance to answer comments (the time to return to my real life approaches). I might have time to answer comments tomorrow, but I make no promises. At the end of the day, I figure people would rather have updates than answered comments.
> 
> As always, thanks to [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02) for beta-reading!

Eiji’s bored expression didn’t change for an instant, which did little to help Sakura escape the sinkhole that the med-chuunin’s words dropped her in. He hopped off of the high chair and started walking towards the set of double doors that led to the trauma bay, a wide chamber with a few beds and designated semi-sterile fields that served as impromptu operating rooms for the most emergent cases. 

“Hyuuga, go up to J-level and find Jian,” said Eiji. “Tell him I need him down here for a possible neurosurg consult. Be prompt; I do not have anyone else to spare on this. Kaisha, take over here for now. You two,” he added, with a glance in Sakura and Kabuto’s direction, “come on.”

The trauma bed was half a hallway away, beyond a couple of unintuitive turns that kept most visitors from finding the place by accident. Sakura’s legs shook the whole way there, and the sight of the double doors on the opposite side of the chamber made her throat clench. Med-chuunin on paramedic duty, or returning from missions that had gone south, brought in patients through that back door, which skipped the front entrance and regular triage altogether. 

“Get cleaned up,” Eiji said, pushing the double doors to the room open. His hands glowed bright blue with chakra for a brief second, then he walked towards the cabinet that held surgical gowns that had been autoclaved.

Harsh, bright light bulbs more intense than anywhere else in the village illuminated five clean hospital beds separated by heavy curtains. Aside from the lone med-chuunin sitting at the personnel station with a crash cart ready, the trauma bay was deserted.

“I think he forgot those are your teammates,” said Kabuto, as they went to the faucet and reached for pockets of disinfectant.

Sakura tried to keep her mind blank as she meticulously washed her hands, each side of each finger individually and under her fingernails, determined to behave as the booklet Eiji had tossed at them during their first shift instructed. _Keep a clear head, even if it’s your closest teammate you’re treating. You’re of no use to anyone hysterical._

But which teammate had it been? Sasuke? Naruto? Did it matter?

Neither, as it turned out. The EMS chuunin team wheeled in Neji, wearing a neck collar and with his eyes squeezed shut. Sakura still blinked back tears as she walked to stand behind Eiji. Kabuto had taped leads on his torso to monitor his heartbeat, and though it was normal (as far as she could tell), it wasn’t any better to see Neji so pale, and breathing shallowly. 

“What’s the story?” asked Eiji.

“Explosion,” said one of the chuunin. “He was pretty close, lost consciousness for about two minutes, threw up bile when he woke up, has been awake, alert, and oriented since. Complaining of 10/10 generalized pain, worst at the left temple. Neck seemed fine on exam; put him in a bracer anyway, just in case. Didn’t give him anything on the way. No one else was injured.”

“Sakura,” said Eiji, as he walked towards Neji, “get a gown and warm blankets. Kabuto, let’s do the trauma survey.”

By the time Sakura returned, heated up blankets and a flimsy hospital gown in hands, Eiji had removed the neck brace and Neji’s clothes, and hastily thrown a thin white bedsheet over his waist. 

“Kid, open your eyes for me,” said Eiji. “Keep them open; I need to check your pupils. . . alright, fine. Just point at where it hurts worst.”

Sakura walked around Eiji’s bulk to the patterned hospital gown around Neji’s neck, careful not to disturb the leads on his torso. He flinched away from her touch, and she had to resist an instinct to step away from him. They needed to keep him as warm as possible to decrease whatever stress response he was going through. And he probably would thank her for doing what little she could to protect his modesty later.

“Kabuto, start a second line,” said Eiji, his large fingers working to remove Neji’s headband. “Somebody go get me Itachi. I wanna put this kid down with genjutsu.”

“I thought that didn’t work on the Hyuuga,” said one of the med-chuunin.

“Just go _get_ him,” snapped Eiji.

Kabuto extended Neji’s left arm, gestured at Sakura to get the sleeve of the hospital gown out of the way, then wrapped a bright blue elastic band around his biceps. “Nice obvious veins under pale skin,” he mumbled at Sakura, as he fiddled with a needle.

“Give me some room, Flower Petal,” said Eiji.

Sakura stepped back to hover a few paces away from the foot of the bed. Her breath caught at the light blue X tattoo adorning Neji’s forehead. Pretty, but a sign of his servitude. His eyes blinked open and caught hers for an instant, then he squeezed them shut and offered a pained smirk. 

“Told you I’d get that clone,” he said.

The trauma doors swung open. Sakura battled relief at the sight of Itachi, impassive as ever, following the med-chuunin to Neji’s bed. What could Itachi even do?

“Make the kid think he’s not in pain,” said Eiji, reaching for his penlight. “But keep him awake and able to follow commands. Sakura, go make sure Hyuuga didn’t get lost on the stairs or some shit. I need Jian. He should be at J-level. If not, go talk to the chuunin manning the OR desk. Say I got head trauma on a cursed seal in the trauma bay.”

She walked backwards, reluctant to take her eyes off Neji as Kabuto put transparent tape over the intravenous catheter. When her back touched the double doors leading to the rest of the hospital, Itachi leaned over the foot of the bed and Neji visibly relaxed. Eiji gestured at him and shone a penlight directly into his eyes as the double doors swung closed.

Her long strides turned into a run without her consciously deciding to do so. She pushed through the door leading to the staircase, then paused at the third floor to even her breathing. _Told you I’d get that clone_ and _no one else was injured_ ran on a loop in her mind as tears threatened to spill from her eyes. 

No time for that. She took a deep breath and pushed forward.

The med-chuunin at the nurse’s station on J-level waved Sakura towards a tall man with streaks of silver running through his thick black hair. He wore a long medic’s white coat, and Hinata stood before him with her arms folded in front of her lap as he wrote something on a medical chart. A big stack of the things laid in front of him, removed from their designated spots on the chart rack.

 _Goddamnit, Hinata_ , she thought as she rushed forward. How could she not interrupt the man’s charting to tell him that he was needed for a possible _brain_ injury.

“Sir? Jian?” 

The man raised his head, and Sakura hesitated at the sight of his Byakugan. One of Hinata’s cousins, and still she couldn’t just be rude for a moment.

“Eiji wants you down at the trauma bay for a severe head trauma on a cursed seal. It’s Neji.”

He put the chart down and flickered away without a word. Hinata stared at the spot where he’d been with wide eyes, then glanced at Sakura and hunched her shoulders. Her eyes flew to the floor, and she tapped the pads of her index fingers together.

“He was talking when I left,” said Sakura, remembering that Hinata and Neji were near-siblings. “I t-think he’ll be alright.”

“That’s g-good,” said Hinata, turning and walking away.

Sakura breathed, squeezed her eyes shut, and squared her shoulders. The people of the village hadn’t paused getting sick and injured so all hospital resources could be devoted to Neji. She had to go back to the ER. 

Eiji and Jian were firing back at each other in technical terms by the time she got back to the trauma bay. She could only gather that Neji had suffered a cranial fracture, and that Jian wanted to do some complicated stuff with chakra scalpels and a physical blade because of some particularly fragile blood vessel close to the brain. 

“It should be fine; he got here fast enough,” said Jian, while Kabuto started a drip of morphine under Eiji’s supervision. “Let’s just take him to the OR right away.”

“Take Kaisha,” said Eiji. “I have to—”

“—No, this could get ugly,” said Jian, striding to Neji’s bedside. “I’m not dealing with a trainee unless I have to.”

“I was a trainee a month ago,” Eiji mumbled at his retreating back. Then he turned to Sakura and frowned. “What are you doing, Flower Petal? Go help Kaisha.”

She didn’t remember that it was Friday evening until the third drunk dumped at the ER by ANBU general patrols barfed on her feet. 

“Shit,” slurred the man, then he added a burp. “Can I get dinner?”

Disgusting, but at least the busywork distracted her from the memory of Neji naked on a hospital bed, hooked up to monitors and being poked full of holes. It’d been at least three hours, and still no sign of Eiji, or even Kabuto. Or Hinata, who’d probably gone off to hide until her cousin’s surgery was done. Sakura didn’t blame her.

That older chuunin, Kaisha, still helmed the ER. Though Sakura hated to admit, she missed Eiji, even though Kaisha was about a hundred times nicer. It’d never been so obvious that Eiji’s obsession with speed and efficacy kept them all from drowning under a bunch of. . . bullshit patients. Sakura cringed inwardly to think of them in those terms, but there were twenty beds in the ER and twelve of them were occupied by people who weren’t sick, just drunk or high. Eiji would have refused most of them, often with hilarious comebacks for the ANBU trying to unload them.

 _I don’t care about your backlog, Deer. This is an emergency room, not ANBU’s toilet. I am not here to deal with your shit. Fuck off._ Why couldn’t Kaisha say something like that?

But Kaisha complained, politely, and the ANBU pretended to care while leaving rowdy civilians to sober up under medical supervision. Meanwhile, villagers with injuries, infections, and vague but genuine medical complaints flooded the waiting room. Kaisha just beckoned Sakura patiently while she sidestepped one of the hallway drunks who’d already slapped her butt twice. Sakura was an insult away from using him as Shurikenjutsu target practice.

“Where’s Kabuto?” asked Kaisha, as she cleaned a forearm gash on the one drunk who actually had reason to be there. ANBU reported that he’d taken exception to some other drunk cutting in line, but the other drunk happened to be an ex-chuunin who’d gotten dishonorably for showing up to a mission high.

“At the OR with Eiji,” answered Sakura, frowning at the reminder of Neji’s injury.

Kaisha grunted, scanning the ER. Three other medics buzzed about, monitoring vitals and trying to draw blood and the like, while their inebriated patients babbled threats and/or jokes at each other. A baby howled indignantly while his mother rocked him on bed nine, both of them looking sallow under the ER’s harsh, yellow light bulbs. A line had formed at the bathroom door, with some people holding little cups to collect their own urine. 

“You ever sutured before?” asked Kaisha, scratching her forehead.

“Yes,” said Sakura. On steak, but technically, yes. She’d been practicing a lot.

“Then handle this,” said Kaisha, gesturing at the drunk. “It’s superficial, and he’s so out of it he won’t even need painkillers.”

Sakura went to grab a suture kit while Kaisha went back to backing up the rest of the med-chuunin. With so much of Sakura’s focus directed at the drunk’s gash, she couldn’t spare a thought for the people still in the waiting room, or the parade of ANBU delivering all their rubbish at them. Neji wasn’t as easy to forget. 

The guy was completely zoned out, unaware of Sakura pulling on his skin to inspect the gash. Yellow, bubbly subcutaneous fat was visible, but not even a hint of muscle. By some manner she couldn’t explain, the bleeding had long since stopped, and it didn’t start up when she doused the laceration with betadine solution. Her hand trembled when she first pierced the skin, but the drunk didn’t stir. A couple of stitches in, the din of the ER had faded to the background, and her hands moved as though it was a rather fatty piece of steak. She had to soften her touch so as to not cause inadvertent damage, and her line didn’t come out as smooth as Kabuto’s, but the drunk would live to fight another day. 

She didn’t know how long it took her to suture the cut, but it was certainly long enough that Eiji would’ve yelled at her for not doing it faster. And it was good that she finished because Eiji chose that moment to barge in through the double doors that led to the trauma bay. He scanned the ER, rolled his eyes, then stalked towards Sakura. 

“Passable,” he said, after a glance at the drunk’s laceration. Kaisha walked towards them, and Eiji raised a hand before she could speak. “Quite a shitshow you’ve got here.”

“I’m handling it,” said Kaisha.

“And I’m gonna let you spread your wings,” said Eiji. “Come on, Pink. Let’s go find your sensei. Kaisha, if you can clean this mess up in the time it takes me to get back, I’ll go to Hokage-sama myself and tell him you should be promoted.”

“Sir,” started Sakura, as they walked out of the ER.

“Apparently, I’m the only one she can be a bitch to,” said Eiji, rubbing his eyes.

“About Neji?”

“Fine, extubated, sleeping off the sedation,” said Eiji. He reached into his pocket and handed Sakura a blank incident report page. “Write the important stuff down.”

Itachi, and the rest of the team, were still in the near-deserted waiting room. Tenten had dozed off on Lee’s shoulder, and Sasuke and Naruto huddled close a few chairs away. Itachi stood in the corner, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed.

“How is he?” asked Itachi.

Naruto and Tenten jumped to their feet. Lee stood up, looking grim.

“Fine, he’s fine,” said Eiji, yawning. 

“Can we go see him?” asked Tenten. 

“Sure, G-green, Room 1408, but he’s gonna be out for the next six hours, at least,” said Eiji.

They still went. Sakura nodded at them, wishing she could follow, but she had a job to do.

“So,” said Eiji. “Genin aren’t supposed to get injured like that in training. What the fuck happened?” 

Itachi began the story in his dead tone, looking Eiji in the eye. It wasn’t a long tale, but Eiji stopped him all the same. “Wait, wait,” he said, shaking his head as if to wake himself. “You sicced one of those exploding clone things at your genin. . . why?”

“I forgot to make a regular clone,” said Itachi.

“You don’t know how to make a regular clone?” demanded Eiji. “ _I_ can make a regular fucking clone. Any dumb genin can.”

“I didn’t say I forgot _how_ to do it,” said Itachi. “I forgot _to_ do it. Subtle, but an important difference.”

“Alright,” said Eiji, chuckling. “So you set the bomb on the kid by _mistake_ , and then. . .”

“Neji beat the clone,” said Itachi, looking sheepish for the first time. “It never occurred to me that any of them would come close to that.”

“So you let the fight go on. . . why?” Eiji shook his head. “Itachi, you’ve killed people with that clone. He could’ve died.”

“No, I didn’t let the fight go on,” said Itachi. “I wasn’t there.”

Eiji stared, grey eyes wide. Sakura didn’t know what to write.

“Where the fuck were you?”

“Meditating.”

“You set the bomb clone on your genin, then went off to meditate.” Eiji took a deep breath, then exhaled. 

Sakura would be happier that someone potentially important was finally noticing Itachi’s negligence, but it’d taken Neji nearly dying for it. Talk about hollow victories. . .

“You couldn’t at least lie about it?” asked Eiji.

“I’m picky about my lies,” said Itachi. “Besides, I’d have had to use genjutsu on at least five genin to make it stand.”

“How the fuck am I supposed to report this?” Eiji asked the ceiling.

“Report it exactly as it happened,” said Itachi.

“Is that why you don’t care?” demanded Eiji. “You’re that sure the brass is gonna look the other way because it’s just a genin, so who gives a fuck?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t care,” said Itachi. “With the benefit of hindsight, I should’ve paid more attention, obviously. But I’m hardly going to make things better after the fact by getting hysterical.”

“You’re right, blatant not giving a shit looks better on you.”

“You’re so emotional all the time.”

“Fuck you.” Eiji ripped the incident report out of Sakura’s hand, and she wondered if either of them would notice if she just walked away. “I’m about to be very candid with my recommendations here, you psychopath. This entire village might be willing to look the other way, but I’m at the end of my rope. Go back to Kaisha, Flower Petal.”

Sakura stole a glance at Itachi’s face. She thought she saw a frown, but she didn’t want to attract his attention. She practically ran back to the ER.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here. I went on a hiking trip this weekend.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I was complaining to luvsanime02 that it sucked that I had to make up two OCs because Kishimoto didn't even mention Neji and Hinata's mothers, and that I kinda wanted to go full-on telenovela on this and make them the same woman. . . and here we are.
> 
> Thanks again to [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02) for beta-reading!

Sakura tried not to think about the incident for the rest of her shift, not even when Eiji returned to the ER practically shooting fire out of his eyes. He spent a good hour quarantining the drunks to a corner, refused further patients from ANBU, and glared at everyone and everything until the place had returned to its usual bustle. Sakura got to suture two more lacerations on his orders, including a deep cut on a woman’s calf.

She tried to take pride in Eiji’s unspoken approval of her skills rather than obsess about what “candid recommendations” he’d written on Neji’s incident report. What happened to a genin team if their jounin-sensei was found unfit to be a jounin-sensei? Would the team be disbanded? Would they be assigned a new jounin? Those questions were never answered in the Academy, and Sakura had never thought to ask them.

Thinking of Neji hardly helped. Though Eiji had seemed unconcerned, she’d seen him unconcerned about people as they died under his nose, after he’d decided that there was nothing to be done for them except make them as comfortable as possible. She tried to remember Eiji’s bored assertion that Neji would be fine, but Eiji’s words weren’t stronger than the sight of Neji on a stretcher, hunched in on himself and unable to open his eyes due to pain. 

Kabuto returned to the ER as the sun peeked through the one lonely window near the main exit, rubbing at the dark circles under his glasses. He offered Sakura a tired smile, then walked towards Eiji. Sakura tried not to yawn as her head pounded. At around four in the morning, the tide of patients seemed to break, leaving her to ruminate about her future, and the future of her team, until she swore gremlins appeared behind her eyes pick at them with icepicks. At least it distracted her from thoughts of Neji.

“You must be worried about the kid,” said Eiji, the next time she passed him by. “Leave early today. He might be awake by now.”

Sakura considered asking about Itachi, or at least the report, but why push her luck? She bowed, nodded at Kabuto as he talked to a new patient a few beds away, and headed upstairs. 

As it turned out, Neji still slept peacefully on his hospital bed, but she did find Hinata dozing on the lumpy couch at his bedside. Sakura spared a moment to feel guilty for completely forgetting about her during the circus with the surgery, and then Itachi, and moved to wake her up. Hinata startled awake with a low cry, and Sakura stepped back even though she had trouble imagining her gentle ex-classmate hurting anyone, even in reflexive self-defense. 

“Oh, sorry,” said Hinata, rubbing her eyes. “And sorry for not going back downstairs.”

“No worries,” said Sakura. She’d have stayed with Neji too if she could’ve come up with a decent enough excuse, or if the ER hadn’t been such a mess. “Has he woken up?” 

“No.” Hinata gazed at him, eyebrows furrowed. “Father and Stepmother already came by, and he didn’t even twitch. But the med-chuunin has come to see him twice, and she said he’s alright.”

“Father and Stepmother?” Sakura frowned, confused. “He told me your fathers are twins?”

“U-uncle Hizashi passed away,” said Hinata. “Neji has been living with us ever since.”

“Oh.” She hadn’t thought to ask him specifics all those days ago, when Neji mentioned his father. “It’s good that he still has family.” Although. . . “What happened to his mom?”

“She lives with us too,” said Hinata. “She’s my stepmother.”

“. . . Oh.” Sakura stared down at Neji’s face. Even under surgical anesthesia, he seemed to frown. Perhaps it was the cursed seal. “I should go. My parents will worry if I’m too late. Eiji said he’s fine.”

She barely found the strength for a quick shower when she got home, but at least her mother attributed it to shift work exhaustion and didn’t ask any specific questions. If she had any dreams, she didn’t remember them when she woke around dinnertime, headache almost gone but her stomach growling. 

“Crap, now I’m not sleepy,” she complained to her parents in between bites of smoked fish. “And I have to be at TG-7 tomorrow morning.”

Or so she hoped, anyway. How long until Eiji’s report made it to whoever it was supposed to go to? 

Either no one had gotten to the report, or it wasn’t found to be significant. Team Seven, plus Lee and Tenten, still met at Training Ground Seven, though for once no one complained about anything. Lee didn’t promise to break some absurd training record. Naruto didn’t complain about Itachi’s absence. Even Sasuke, who Sakura thought never really liked Neji in the first place, seemed upset. 

“We should go to the hospital,” said Tenten. “See if he’s awake.”

“They only accept visitors who are family at this time,” said Sakura. 

It was just as well because Itachi chose that moment to appear somewhere behind Sakura. She had a second to be proud that she’d noticed him at about the same time as everyone else, then he was speaking.

“I suppose you’re all still upset. That’s understandable. Would you like to. . . ask me questions?”

“About what?” asked Naruto.

“I’m not sure,” said Itachi. 

“Where were you yesterday?” asked Tenten, glaring in Itachi’s general direction.

“Speaking to Intelligence.”

“What _was_ that clone?” asked Sasuke. If he’d ever spoken directly to Itachi before, then Sakura didn’t remember it.

“It was a Shadow Clone,” said Itachi, as blank as he’d been while Eiji yelled at him the previous evening. Or two evenings ago. Sakura’s internal clock got scrambled every time she did a night shift. “I set it to explode, then forgot to. . . not do that when using it to train you guys.”

“So, you almost killed Neji by mistake?” asked Tenten.

“If I wanted to kill Neji, he’d be dead,” said Itachi. He stared at them for a few moments, then closed his eyes briefly. “By which I mean, yes, I made a mistake. And I’m sorry. It didn’t occur to me that any of you would ever beat my clone.”

“It was just a Shadow Clone,” said Sasuke.

“Then why didn’t you beat it?” asked Itachi.

“Guy-sensei’s going to kill you when he hears about this,” said Tenten, interrupting the world’s most intense and awkward brotherly banter. 

Though Sakura wouldn’t call it that if she knew what else to call it. 

“Do not be a bad sport, Tenten,” said Lee. “Itachi-sensei made an honest mistake, and it all turned out for the best. Neji has a great story to tell about defeating a jounin’s clone.”

“Could I make my clones do that?” asked Naruto. “Could you teach me?”

“I could, theoretically” said Itachi, “but you saw what happened with just one exploding Shadow Clone. You could level the village with enough of them if you know how to use them. Even I couldn’t quite manage something like that.”

“Right, but I wouldn’t do that ever,” said Naruto. “So teach me.”

“That’s not a good idea.” Itachi shrugged. “It’s a moot point anyway; only one person has ever understood my explanation about how to do it.”

“Oh, come on!” said Naruto. “Even when you approach coolness, you turn right around and suck again.”

“Where did you learn it, anyway?” asked Sasuke. “Probably anyone else would be better at explaining anything than you.”

“I didn’t learn it from anyone,” said Itachi. “When I first learned Shadow Clones, I thought it would be useful to detonate them, so I figured out how to do it. It’s such an obvious strategy that I assumed everyone else used them like that, but it turns out I was the first to think of it.” His upper lip curled slightly, as if everyone else’s lack of foresight still rankled.

“So, you developed your own Shadow Clone technique?” asked Sakura.

“I guess,” said Itachi. “But I’d prefer we save the phrase ‘developed your own technique’ for something a little less obvious than ‘make the thing explode as an offensive and/or diversionary tactic’.”

“Unbelievable,” Naruto told Sasuke, rolling his eyes. 

“Anyway,” said Itachi, “I’ve decided not to use clones for training purposes anymore, though I could still make a regular Shadow Clone and it would be safe.”

“I eagerly await your new methods,” said Sasuke.

Sakura didn’t know when exactly Sasuke had gone from studiously pretending Itachi didn’t exist to throwing sarcastic comments around, but it didn’t seem like Itachi had noticed the change.

“For starters,” he said, “it’d be ridiculous if I manage to graduate a genin team without teaching them the basics of genjutsu, at the very least.”

“Or Shurikenjutsu,” said Tenten, obviously not about to let her anger at Itachi stop her from taking advantage of his sudden urge to teach.

“This should be good,” said Naruto.

It actually was. Itachi led them to the strip of forest near the pond and set up a series of targets against tree trunks. Sure, he had no concept of pacing and tried to teach them some complicated trick about redirecting projectiles mid-air by striking them with a second projectile, but Tenten proved essential in reeling him in. She knew enough of Shurikenjutsu to ask him specific questions, and half-an-hour into his sparse demonstrations, she was coaxing him into more detailed explanations with lots, lots of follow-up questions.

Sakura took notes for the future, when Team Guy wouldn’t be around to guide Itachi’s teaching. Maybe that was the issue. Itachi was no use for anyone who didn’t know the basics, but he was willing to answer questions when asked.

They went to visit Neji after lunch, laughing among themselves despite the circumstances. Sakura spotted Itachi’s glossy crows flying around Neji’s window, their dark wings a sharp contrast to the bright blue summer sky. She smiled, thinking that Itachi couldn’t be as uncaring of the incident with Neji if he had the crows watching over him.

Neji was finally awake, picking at a tray of food while Hinata sat on a chair by the window, gazing at the crowd of buildings that neighbored the hospital. 

“I hate to be a stereotype,” Neji said after the usual greetings, frowning at his tray, “but this is disgusting. What do these cooks have against seasoning?” The blue markings of the cursed seal stood in stark contrast to the pale skin of his forehead, but someone had discontinued all the lines and Sakura didn’t see a catheter anywhere. He could walk on his own. 

A weight she’d stopped thinking about lifted off her shoulders. 

“When are you getting out?” asked Naruto. “I’ll get you the best Ichiraku’s has to offer. Zero spiciness.”

“I told you before, I don’t like ramen,” said Neji.

“Then Itachi can take us to a fancy restaurant again,” said Naruto. “He’s the one who almost blew you up in the first place.”

“I’ve taken you to several fancy restaurants for no particular reason,” said Itachi.

“Do not worry, Neji,” said Lee. “I will go easy on you until you have fully recovered.”

“Yeah, that won’t be necessary,” said Neji, tapping his left temple lightly. “The surgeons didn’t even leave a scar.”

Sakura sighed, relieved to see that the worse had passed. She walked over to Hinata while Tenten “tested Neji’s reflexes” by trying to poke at him from his peripheral vision, whatever that was for Hyuuga. She wasn’t getting at him.

“He’s gonna be okay,” said Sakura.

“He always is,” said Hinata, without looking away from the window.

Sakura got the strange sense that she meant. . . something not entirely nice. Which made little sense, since Hinata and Neji were as good as siblings, and she’d been glued to his side since the injury. She still wore her white medic’s coat, suggesting that she hadn’t even gone home to change. 

Eiji walked into the room before Sakura could think of anything else to say, flipping through a chart and humming to himself.

“Does he live here?” Sakura asked Hinata, trying not to be too obvious about her interest in his interaction with Itachi.

Nothing. Itachi was very good at pretending people didn’t exist, and Eiji was probably used to it.

“Kid, it’s almost time to go,” Eiji said, shooing away the other genin. He reached for Neji’s face and pushed his hair away to palpate around his right temple. “I hope your parents brought a change of clothing for you, ‘cause we had to cut you out of the outfit you came in with.”

“Hinata-sama?” Neji asked while Eiji hand glowed blue on his temple.

That was an awkward title for a sister. 

“Yes, Stepmother brought clothes l-last night while you slept,” said Hinata. “I put them on the drawers by the bed.”

She didn’t look at Neji at all as she said it, which Sakura had once attributed to her Byakugan, but she’d been spending enough time with Neji to know better. He always looked people in the eye when he talked to them. Something strange was going on with Neji and Hinata. How long ago had their parent married? And how long ago had Neji’s father died? 

Neji passed the neurological exam with flying colors, and Eiji told him to get out ASAP, heedless of the celebration going on around him. He rubbed his eyes as he walked away, and, perhaps by chance, glanced towards the window.

“Oh, Hyuuga and. . . I forgot your name again.”

Wonderful.

“Your trial period is over; welcome to the med corp for real.” Eiji sighed. “Someone will deliver the didactic schedule to your houses soon enough. The lectures aren’t mandatory, but the tests are. Try to keep up with them, and if someone tries to recruit you into ANBU, run the fuck away.” 

“There was a trial period?” Sakura asked his retreating back, before she quite registered the first part of his spiel.

Almost no one registered it. The rest of the team was too busy celebrating Neji’s recovery. Sakura herself didn’t think of it until Hinata mumbled “Congratulations” with a small smile. 

“Yeah, congratulations,” said Sakura, nodding. “You should come with us,” she added, gesturing at the bed, where Lee had worked himself into giving Neji a tight bear hug. “To celebrate Neji not dying.”

Even if her team hadn’t noticed her accomplishment, Sakura was a in a celebrating mood. She didn’t blame them anyway, since even she hadn’t known that there was something to accomplish. If she had, she’d probably have worried herself into failing, just like she had at the pond when the med-chuunin gave her those simple exercises. 

She smiled, then went to join her team.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here. 
> 
> Still limited time to mess around online because of work requirements. It's the weekend, so hopefully I'll get to answer some comments.


	12. Epilogue: Ibiki

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have slowly started to answer comments. Two or three at a time, but hopefully I can keep up. In the meantime, here's the last chapter. Once again, through Ibiki's POV.
> 
> As always, thanks to [luvsanime02](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luvsanime02/pseuds/luvsanime02) for beta-reading! Couldn't have finished this, certainly not so quickly, without her help :)

“Hiashi is not pleased,” Hokage-sama said, between breathing out puffs of smoke. He stood by the largest window in his office at the top floor of the Tower, gazing down at the village with calm eyes. In his left hand, he held the report that Eiji had filed regarding the ‘training accident’ that had landed Hyuuga Neji in the OR for brain surgery. 

Ibika had almost stroked out when Anko deposited the thing on his desk, smirking.

Hokage-sama’s eyes wrinkled as he looked down at the report. “I would be too if a nephew of mine was almost killed in a training accident, and the surgeon who treated him reported _this_.”

The report was a disaster from beginning to end, but the worst part had etched itself into Ibiki’s brain with a hot poker. 

_This happened because Konoha’s most badass jounin feels too special for teaching, so he set a detonating clone on a genin and fucked off to navel gaze. He’s not sorry. He probably wouldn’t be sorry if he’d killed the kid, and why would he when this village would let him get away with anything as long as he’s willing to kill whoever he’s told to kill? Just as long as his brand of crazy doesn’t turn into the likes-to-kill brand of crazy. Good news, this wasn’t a PTSD flashback, or weird vendetta, or willful sabotaging of the Hyuuga (Neji’s the one causing trouble in the Hyuuga clan by being super-good at Gentle Fist and eyeball magic, right? Though if we’re comparing him to what’s-her-name, probably-not-the-future-clan-head, then I bet he’s just average). Anyway, Itachi’s not having a psychotic break, he just plain does not give a fuck. He shouldn’t be in charge of genin at all, but that’s no secret, and no one likes the Nine-Tails kid anyway. So, you know, fuck it._

“Who let him file this?” asked Hokage-sama.

“This is a development no one expected,” said Ibiki. Though it probably should have been. 

“Kakashi and Guy have returned,” said Hokage-sama. “Would he be a better jounin-sensei for Naruto?” 

“Maybe,” said Ibiki, sighing. “At the end of the day, is there really much of a difference between Kakashi and Itachi?”

“Kakashi’s older.”

“He’s failed every genin team we’ve tried to assign to him,” said Ibiki. “He doesn’t want the job any more than Itachi does.”

“I miss the days when my jounin didn’t throw tantrums when they were assigned a mission they didn’t like,” said Hokage-sama, handing Ibiki Eiji’s report. “Perhaps Danzo has a point about the proper way to instill obedience among one’s followers.” 

“Ideally,” said Ibiki, trying to ignore the signs of stress in the Third’s frame, “Jiraiya-sama would take over Naruto’s training. But we can’t find him, and the last time we did, he was more interested in his peeping world tour.”

“At least Itachi and Kakashi have the excuse of youth.”

Their only excuse, the only one that mattered, was their power. Itachi and Kakashi were the best jounin in the village. As much as the Council liked to posture, they had to know that Sharingan Kakashi and Konoha’s Wraith couldn’t be forced to do anything, never mind something as complex as complex and long-term as teaching. And Jiraiya wasn’t even a Leaf shinobi anymore, friendly as he was when it suited him. 

“Make sure this was just teenage arrogance and carelessness,” said Hokage-sama. “Then contain the mess. Get Itachi out of ANBU once and for all, and if you determine that he’s been persistently dangerous to his genin, report to me personally.”

Ibiki wouldn’t be any good at his job if he couldn’t compartmentalize, so he set aside his anxieties about their options and went searching for information. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked. 

He started with Eiji, who showed up to Intelligence Headquarters dressed as a civilian and half-asleep. 

“It’s my first day off in two weeks,” he told Ibiki, dropping onto the guest chair like an elephant. He put his elbows on the table and gazed out the window, sighing wistfully. Birds chirped happily before landing on the tree branch that touched the windowpane. “I got a night shift tomorrow, and you’re eating into my precious thirty-six hours of nothing to do.”

“This was poetic,” said Ibiki, lifting the Incident Report where Eiji had scrawled his anti-Itachi diatribe. “I particularly liked the part where you speculated that Itachi might’ve tried to kill Neji on some kind of orders.”

“To be honest with you,” said Eiji, shrugging, “I don’t even remember half the shit I wrote on that. I was a little emotional and sleep-deprived at the time.”

“I will keep that in mind in case I need someone to feed to the wolves.”

“Oh, come on,” said Eiji, rubbing his eye. “Nobody fucking listens to me.”

“When a jounin says anything, people pay attention.”

“But no one thinks I’m a jounin on merit, just the quality of my blowjobs,” shrugged Eiji. “So, whatever.”

Sure, the rank-and-file might believe that, but anyone with the slightest capacity for politics had reviewed his actual record, including the number of ANBU missions he’d supported (with and without Itachi as his CO), and jumped to the natural conclusion that the brass had judged him qualified. Most probably viewed his relationship with Itachi as a golden mark on his resume. Who else could boast to have the slightest idea of what went on in that bastard’s head? Even Ibiki admitted that, more often than not, he was flying blind.

“Eiji.” The kid looked at him with wide eyes, as though he wasn’t used to hearing his own name. Most people weren’t used to hearing it from Ibiki. “I know you like to spew whatever comes to your mind at any given moment, but what you say is important now. What you put in fucking writing,” he waved the Incident Report for emphasis, “is even more important. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” To his credit, Eiji kept eye contact. 

“Well then, since you admit you were emotional and sleep-deprived when you dropped this massive turd on my lap, I’m gonna ask you to read it over.” Ibiki slid the report over to him. “Let’s see if there’s anything you’d like to amend, now that your mind is clearer.”

Eiji had the gall to chuckle a few times as he read, and Ibiki had to resist the urge to look up at the heavens and ask why he was always the one dealing with upstart teenagers. 

“You know, my vocabulary does get a little colorful when I’m pissed,” he said.

“Eiji.”

“Right, right.” He slid the report back to Ibiki. “I see now, in the light of day, how some of that wasn’t worded in the most diplomatic manner. But if I edit it now, everyone will know it’s because you, or someone scarier, made me. Political damage worsened, blah, blah, blah.”

“I didn’t mean amend it on the actual report,” said Ibiki, though he noted that the kid, for all his protests that he was a nobody, grasped the basic maneuvers of politics. “But were you serious? Do you really think he’s unfit to be a jounin instructor?” 

“Oh, for sure,” said Eiji, leaning back on the chair. “He doesn’t care about those kids, and he’s gonna get them killed. If not by exploding a goddamned clone on them, then by not teaching them how to handle themselves out in the field.”

“He doesn’t even care about the brother?” Ibika had hoped that Sasuke’s presence would persuade Itachi to take the jounin instructor assignment seriously. 

“He cares, but if you think that translates to ‘let me help him be a badass’, then you’re not as good at psych as you think.”

Ibiki snorted, mostly to himself. “That’s about all I need. Next time, don’t document your speculations about what the brass might be doing in regards to the Hyuuga. Or any other clan, for that matter.” He considered doing more to reprimand Eiji, but the kid was refreshingly honest in a world of liars. Ibiki didn’t have to account for honesty often, but he liked it the few times it happened. 

Ultimately, any decisions about Itachi hinged on testimony from an unusual source: genin. Perhaps he’d ignored Uzumaki Naruto’s rants about Itachi’s absences for too long. 

Not perhaps. He’d definitely swept too much under the rug, like a kid hoping that solutions would materialize with time. Instead, the situation had worsened, and he had no one to blame but himself. He sighed, allowing himself a moment of weakness and regret before starting the interviews with Itachi’s genin. 

“Yeah, this is pretty much what happened,” said the Nine-Tails kid, after reading a heavily-edited version of Eiji’s report. “Though I didn’t realize he forgot about the exploding part. You know he thinks he can’t teach me to explode my Shadow Clones because it’d be ‘too dangerous’?” The kid snorted. “Hypocrite.” 

Well, at least Itachi had some semblance of common sense left. “Normally, how does he treat you?”

“Ignores me, mostly,” said Naruto, shrugging. “He takes us to expensive restaurants a lot, so that’s nice. And it’s kinda funny how he never reacts to cursing or joking, but don’t tell him I said that because I tell him it makes me mad.”

“Are you scared of him?”

“Itachi?” Naruto frowned. “Why would I be scared of him? He’s just lazy.”

The rest of the kids said more-or-less the same, with the exception of Sasuke. They were varying levels of hurt and angry about the accident with Neji, but all were confused by the idea that they might be scared of Itachi. Guy’s favorite went as far as to defend him, and his girl seemed resentful, but even she proved unwilling to describe Itachi with more than exasperation.

And then there was Sasuke.

“You know what he is, and why he was assigned to this team,” Sasuke said after reading the edited report and putting it aside. “I don’t know what the point of this is.”

“Formalities,” said Ibiki. “Hiashi’s nephew almost died.”

“Can I go, then?” asked Sasuke, dark eyes narrowed. “What I say here doesn’t matter.”

It mattered a little bit. “Is your brother unhinged?”

“He’s the same,” said Sasuke. “It’d probably be easier for me if he was crazy, but he isn’t. He just doesn’t care.”

Ibiki would argue against that, but he had no interest in Sasuke’s opinions about Itachi’s motivations. He had what he needed from the kid. Even Itachi’s estranged brother wasn’t afraid of him (not viscerally, as he might be of a rabid animal).

“I think this was just a mix of arrogance and laziness,” Ibiki told Anko later that evening. “Itachi’s not crazy, he’s just _seventeen_.” 

Ibiki hated teenagers. 

“So, you’re doing nothing?” asked Anko. “At least glower at him, or something.”

“I’ll cut his pay, and bar him from ANBU missions,” said Ibiki. “But that won’t faze him. It’s mostly so the Hyuuga get the feeling that he’s been reprimanded.”

“Shit, threaten him with worse,” said Anko. “I know he’s strong, but that just means he needs more limits than most.”

“Didn’t you have a fling with him?” Ibiki spread his arms. “You tell me. What can I threaten him with?”

Anko sighed, then reached for a serving of dango. “If you want, I’ll go sleep with him again. Keep in touch; see if he’s losing it. He’s a pretty a good lay, actually. Just boring as hell otherwise.”

“That would be helpful,” said Ibiki. “Not sleeping with him, necessarily, but maintaining some kind of relationship. I’ll leave the details to your discretion.”

“He’ll see you’re putting me up to this, for sure,” said Anko. “But even if he decides to get rid of me, the way he goes about it will tell us about his mental state.”

“If you think he might attack you—”

“—Please,” said Anko. “If I thought he was dangerous, I’d probably still be doing him.”

“He is dangerous,” said Ibiki. “Maybe not in a way you find interesting, but that doesn’t mean you should take him lightly.”

“Relax, Dad. I’m not planning to treat him like a bunny.”

There was no point in arguing with Anko, most days. She was good at her job, and Itachi was hardly violent. Much to his annoyance, Ibiki would just have to wait and see.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My blog](http://www.dynamicallyopposed.com/) is here.


End file.
